What’s stopping us from making smellulators, for games or movies?
Vietnamwar videogame: smell of napalm in the morning.
The sims: baby pooped.
Survival game: that lump of flesh is rotting.
Smell you later
Technologically, nothing. They’ve even been made before! (Japanese scientists even made a device that would let you taste things!)
The problem is, nobody actually wants to buy them so nobody is making them for people to not buy because that would be a waste of time and money. Knowing that death and sewers are super common in games, I can’t say I would want smell-o-vision myself.
Do you have a source on that tasteulator?
TL;DR it worked but was often considered a poor, synthetic, replacement for the real world scents. Some people liked it, but most seemed to dislike it.
“Smell-o-Vision” was predated by “AromaRama” and followed by “Odorama” and some other scratch and sniff attempts. Various motion or “4D” rides have also tried to incorporate smell, then often drop it.
Audiences just don’t like it.
Images flash by and disappear. Sounds may resonate a little but are basically gone as soon as you stop making them.
Smells linger.
Imagine the cattleyard smell still hanging in the air when the scene has changed to milady’s boudoir, or to the fancy restaurant.
good point.
Too complex, too many inputs needed, it would be a proprietary exploitation product nightmare like liquid ink paper printers, initially bringing such a product to market would make it cost a fortune, and it would need widespread adoption before the economy of scale could kick in.
Fascinating. I thought smell-o-vision was just a joke in Futurama.
I saw a theatrical performace in 1997, called The Peplum by theatre company Royal de Luxe.
It included ‘odorama’, a contraption that looked like a TV studio camera on dolly rails across the front of the stage, that sprayed the audience stands with about 6 different smells throughout the performance.
One of the smells was horse manure, which was a nervous shock for the audience. Yes it smelt like horse poo.
A very memorable performance, because of the smells, but also the exceptional company behind it.
I remember a 3D show at Disney that did this when I was a kid. William Castle did something like that once too iirc
Edit: William Castle did the thing where he shocked viewers with electricity, not the smell stuff.
Edit 2: I think it was this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_Tough_to_Be_a_Bug!
They released a stinky smell when the stink bug character was on screen.
Mmm…styrene, benzene, and other carcinogenic aromatic hydrocarbons…
It’s a mystery who just read Ready Player One. A complete mystery.
Nah he watched Futurama.
Never heard of it
Smell is a pretty complex thing.
For vision, we only have four different kinds of receptors, which can be stimulated by electromagnetic waves on a one-dimensional spectrum.
For smells, we have about 350 different kinds of receptors. Also, they can’t easily be stimulated by electromagnetic waves, but only by molecules, which are much more difficult/costly to transport to their corresponding receptors.
