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
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.
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.
Mmm…styrene, benzene, and other carcinogenic aromatic hydrocarbons…
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?
