I was perusing an old issue of the Official Dreamcast Magazine (July/August 2000) and I happened across this article about the iSmell - a product by a company called DigiScents that was going to revolutionize gaming by not only hitting your eyes and ears with sensory input but your nose as well. I thought it was interesting so I checked into it a little more.
The iSmell was developed in 2001 and used a cartridge (like an inkjet printer) that contained a number of different chemicals that could be mixed in various combinations and amounts to produce a wide variety of scents. The company had reportedly indexed the required recipes for thousands of common odors. The formula for the mixture would be embedded within a game (or other application) and sent to the iSmell via a USB connection. The chemicals would then be mixed in a chamber and dispersed into the immediate area with a small fan.
Here is what the device looked like - a shark fin on a disk. I couldn't find any reference of the product ever actually hitting production so I assume this was a prototype.
There were a number of promising demonstrations, but apparently the product never got of the ground and now the only references to it I found on the internet were mocking it as a horrible product. But I don't know, I think it would have been kinda cool. They say that scents trigger memories and emotional responses more than any other sensory input - so wouldn't it help thrust the player even deeper into the virtual world of the game? Wouldn't it be more immersive if you could smell the smoke of the burning building that Nathan Drake is trying to escape from in the upcoming Uncharted 3? The smell of the flowers that you were crawling around in during the fight with Boss in Metal Gear Solid 3? The faint whiff of an unseen monster in Resident Evil or Dead Space that got stronger as he approached? The dank underground smell of a cavern in Zork?
In 1986, the Leather Goddesses of Phobos came with a scratch and sniff card and at several parts of the game it would tell you to scratch and sniff scent #1, #2, etc. I rather enjoyed that little novelty, and if modern tech could expand it and make it a passive inclusion rather than an active one that required you to stop playing to experience it that would make it even better.
So, assuming the product functioned properly and software developers supported it in their games, I think may have actually bought this product that never actually saw the light of day.
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