RedShark News
Ever
wondered what virtual reality smells like? Officially it smells of fish. It
also reeks of ramen noodles with overtones of gunpowder and bouquets of meadow.
Along
with tactile force feedback (haptics) it’s the latest sensation to be married
to the audio-visual immersion of VR.
The
innovation comes courtesy of scent-making specialist Vaqso, a
San Francisco-based start-up with Japanese heritage. It has announced a
partnership with Chinese VR headset maker Pimax Technologies. The pair plan on
launching the Pimax headset later this year armed with Vaqso’s scent-emitting
cartridges.
Before
you pooh-pooh the enterprise, the proof will be in the sniffing. Smell-O-Vision
was introduced in the cinema for the 1960 film Scent of Mystery –
albeit only for that movie – and reappeared as a staple of theme park rides
along with rocking chairs and atmospheres like wind and smoke timed to erupt
with the content.
If
the goal of VR is to truly immerse us virtually, then surely scent – usually a
background sense but providing vital clues to the world around us – can help
fool our brain into believing in the authenticity of the experience.
The
band of Vaqso’s device uses an adjustable velcro strap which allows it to be
compatible with any HMD, not just that of Pimax. You can place up to five
different scented oil cartridges that are easy to place and remove.
Cartridges
last around one month, assuming average sniffing of two hours a day, with the
fragrance apparently limited to an area the size of a tennis ball rather than
filling the whole room.
On
the software side, Pimax will integrate Vaqso VR into the Pimax software
development kit for user control of a smell’s strength and weakness, or to
extinguish the scent and switch it off.
The
Pimax headset itself – which has been crowd-funded over $4 million – offers 200
degrees field of view which is almost the full range of a human eye's
peripheral vision. It is also targeting an 8K resolution, although, on closer
inspection, this turns out to be 4K (3840 x 2160) per eye with images rendered
at 80Hz (the original aim was 120Hz), so the viewer perceives a higher
resolution even while in effect one ‘eye’ image will be shuttered at all times.
The
release version, planned for launch in 2018, will
be able to emit five to ten popular scents like ‘ice cream’ and ‘ocean’.
The current generation shows five modules including ‘fish’, and also the
intriguing ‘lady’ which calls to mind Patrick Suskind’s bestselling novel Perfume about
a murderer who kills young girls in order to possess their rare odour.
Pretty
much any smell you can think of, though, could be emulated with custom requests
on demand, Vaqso says.
Perhaps
you could order more nebulous olfactory sensations. What would a VR experience
of Apocalypse Now smell like, I wonder? Victory, of course.
Just mix burning flesh with napalm.
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