Fun Friday: Virtual Smell
A few years ago, I demoed ArrayFire on mobile devices at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. While there, I bumped into a startup with a fun (or weird) product in the virtual reality space. They produce virtual smells.
The idea is to have a bunch of chemicals sitting next to your computer. Software mixes the chemicals and emits smells to correspond to whatever you’re doing on the screen.
If you’re playing a game and walking through a forest, you will smell trees.
If you’re online dating, you will smell perfume.
If you’re watching a McDonald’s commercial, you will smell hamburgers.
I’ll stop there.
Anyway, I did a Google search this evening to try to find the exact company and was overwhelmed by the number of people working on this technology. There is even a HowStuffWorks.com page for explaining internet odors.
At the conference, I tried the startup’s demo and was not very impressed with the quality of smells. I would not want chemicals spraying in the air constantly near my computer.
Do you know anyone that uses virtual smells? Do I even have to ask that? What weird startup ideas have you seen?
From the conversation
Comments preserved from the original post.
Johnson Cook
I love it. Then an entirely new market of personal online fragrances and “smell identities” opens up. There’s a whole ecosystem of apps waiting: I would smell a stink when I have an e-mail from someone I don’t want to hear from (without looking at my inbox).
When I get a blog post from the CEO of ArrayFire, the smell of something burning brushes through the room.
The possibilities are endless!
melonakos
In reply to an earlier comment
Yeah, the imagination can run wild with the concept! Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately depending upon your point of view), the goodness of the technology lags behind the imagination in this case 🙂