This video demonstrates the potential for adding smell to virtual reality. Researchers led by Stockholm University recently created a “wine tasting game” in which the user smells wine in a virtual wine cellar and gets points if their guess on aromas in each wine is correct.
The researchers believe that the open-source technology they have developed can be used to not only enhance game development, but also allow for smell-VR technology expansion into other areas like commercial and retail.
Since shortly after the initial release of virtual worlds, it has been explored to add scent. Virtual reality headsets were introduced in the nineties. However, a few have been available since then. Startups Recent attention has been drawn to the fact that they are experimenting with this technology. Virtual reality should not be limited to the metaverse. Skepticism is growing about virtual reality. Sight and sound.
“It’s critical that scent be [part of] metaverse development . . . or we’re completely limiting the potential,” Aaron Wisniewski, CEO at OVR Technology, a Vermont-based smell-VR tech start-up, Recently told Fast Company. “Smell has this profound effect over who we are, how we feel, what we do, what we buy, who we love.”
The strongest link between memory and emotion is thought to be found in smells than any other senses. According to a Study According to the Marketing Society, around 75 percent of emotions are triggered by smells rather than by what people hear or see.
Recent studies They also found a link between anxiety and depression in the COVID-19-induced loss of smell.
To old-timers and some skeptics, infusing smell into VR recalls Smell-O-Vision, Hollywood’s failed attempt from the late 1950s to incorporate smells into films.
A recent article by Wired, Jude Stewart, author of “Revelations in Air: A Guidebook to Smell,” writes that while smell-VR tech has become more “convincing,” challenges include limits on the number of smell cartridges per headset. He recommends taking it slow.
Mr. Stewart wrote, “Inserting smells into VR can distract, overwhelm or repulse. But used sparingly, and designed to fit the right context and coordinated with the other senses, playing with smell — even distorting it — can render a strange world more human.”
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
What does adding scent to virtual reality tech translate into for retail? What is the minimum requirement for the metaverse to be successful?
“Does a metaverse need to have scent to succeed?”
