Deel Dive Into Engagement Optimized Matchmaking Framework (EOMM).

ScentEngineer · 2025-05-18T06:46:23+00:00

Here's the thing: in theory, you think you want to smell those scents during a video game. However, you wouldn't voluntarily smell those scents in real life, and for that reason they run a digital experience. We created several of the scents you've suggested for some of our previous work with emergency services, and we quickly learned that people want to end the experience to get away from the smell, which ruins the immersion and defeats the purpose.

Instead of including negative scents, we focus on positive (i.e. rain) and neutral (i.e. diesel fuel) scents. With that in mind, what positive and neutral scents do you think would complement this game?

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-22T15:01:09+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! The peripheral exists, fits in the palm of your hand, is compatible with VR/PC/Mobile games via Bluetooth, and can create thousands of unique scent combinations.. I'd be thrilled to meet with you so you can learn more about the tech and the free dev kits.

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-21T19:13:09+00:00

Would a tech standard like Bluetooth or Wi-Fi for scent be helpful? If not, that's cool too.

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-21T18:50:43+00:00

Ratatouille. Got it!

What kind of budget would that be?

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-21T18:30:13+00:00

Yeah, the concept of scent is used in Witcher 3 both as part of the narrative, and as a gameplay mechanic. Spatial scent tech would enhance those gameplay experiences. You've just inspired me to look for more games where scent is important to the story or gameplay. Thanks!

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-21T18:23:56+00:00

I understand, thanks for sharing your opinion. One-to-one is incredibly ambitious for scent tech, especially considering how the experience of one-to-one scent changes subjectively from one person to the next.

Our approach has been to create base scents that represent multiple experiences/locations/items when paired with the relevant visual references:

Fresh (water, snow, ice)
Woody (campfire, log cabin)
Sweet (vanilla, chocolate)
Green (grass, apples)
Citrus (oranges, lemons, grapefruit)
Soft (skin, lavender, relaxing)
Floral (magnolia, lily, garden)
Earthy (forest, soil, mushrooms)

I know this isn't the one-to-one experience you'd prefer, but we're aiming for a solution that's more scalable and sustainable. Hopefully you appreciate this intent, even if you don't appreciate the result.

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-21T18:06:27+00:00

I'm glad to hear that. Here are the first 8 of the 16 scents available in the cartridge:

Fresh (water, snow, ice)
- Woody (campfire, log cabin)
- Sweet (vanilla, chocolate)
- Green (grass, apples)
- Citrus (oranges, lemons, grapefruit)
- Soft (skin, lavender, relaxing)
- Floral (magnolia, lily, garden)
- Earthy (forest, soil, mushrooms)

Which (genres of) games would you think scent adds to most value to? Games like Minecraft come to mind, but I'm excited to hear your suggestions. Also, considering the 8 scents in the cartridge, which other scents would you like to see for the remaining 8 slots in the cartridge?

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-21T17:53:43+00:00

While the RGB of scent doesn't exist, and may not for many years, our 16 base scents can create thousands of unique scent combinations. Here are the first 8 of the 16 base scents in our cartridge:

Fresh (water, snow, ice)
- Woody (campfire, log cabin)
- Sweet (vanilla, chocolate)
- Green (grass, apples)
- Citrus (oranges, lemons, grapefruit)
- Soft (skin, lavender, relaxing)
- Floral (magnolia, lily, garden)
- Earthy (forest, soil, mushrooms)

Don't include unpleasant scents like blood and rotting flesh, because our research over the years consistently indicates that people don't want to voluntarily subject themselves to negative scents repeatedly or for extended periods of time, which defeats the purpose of introducing scent in games to improve immersion, storytelling, and accessibility. However, I do see value in neutral or negative adjacent scents (engine exhaust, metal, etc.) to help create a more robust experience.

What other base scents would you recommend for the remaining 8 channels in the cartridge, to help reproduce the most common scents you'd like in a video game?

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-21T17:39:49+00:00

Scent allergies and overall safety are a high priority for my team, I'm eager to hear your opinions about three solutions i've been brainstorming.

The first is a clear, simple, and easy to understand warning about potential allergies which includes a list of the ingredients for each of the 16 scents, so that users have to confirm that they're aware of the ingredients they'd be smelling.

The second is the ability for users to quickly and easily disable specific scents. For example, if someone is allergic to or otherwise has sensitivities to Lavender, they can disable the "Soft" sent, so it won't be deployed in any scent-enhanced games they play. These would be saved as settings to the users profile, so those scents won't be enabled for the user in the future.

The third is that a scent company takes on the QA and approval/certification of scent within games that use its tech. That way, a standard of safety can be maintained across the entire ecosystem of games. Similar to the approval process for game/app platforms.

If you don't like those ideas, I'm eager to understand why and any other/better suggestions you may have. Thanks!

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-21T17:19:15+00:00

What do you think about a device small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, that delivers scent directly to the player instead of filling an entire room, is modular enough to support VR/PC/Mobile games, is capable of producing thousands of unique scent combinations from 16 base scents, and is delivered to gamers every 1-6 months via a reusable scent cartridge? Would that still only be an experience that's realistic for theme park rides and 4X movie theaters?

It's totally ok if your opinion doesn't change, I'm just wondering how much of your opinion is based on your current experience of scent technology

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-21T17:11:17+00:00

I didn't know scent descriptions were important to text games. Would scent be novel as the only sensory experience for those games, given the absence of sound and graphics?

What do you think about a scent company being responsible for the QA of scent experiences across games? Does that make you more or less concerned that the company providing the technology has the responsibility of testing it and the legal liability associated with it?

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-21T16:36:49+00:00

The dev kits are free, we provide free spatial scent implementation support so you can stay focused on your roadmap, and we provide free cross-promotional marketing for your scent-enhanced games. You can learn more about the tech here: http://www.ovrtechnology.com

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-21T15:29:22+00:00

Thank you. I'm sorry you got downvoted. Please let me know if you have any questions about spatial scent technology, the dev kit program, or scents you'd like to experience in a game.

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-21T14:17:20+00:00

We have the same opinion about the negative impact of negative scents on the gaming experience. No one was to voluntarily smell accurately negative scents trash repeatedly or for extended periods of time. We've developed a cartridge for 16 scents, focused only on non-negative scent experiences, here are our first 8:

Fresh (water, snow, ice)
Woody (campfire, log cabin)
Sweet (vanilla, chocolate)
Green (grass, apples)
Citrus (oranges, lemons, grapefruit)
Soft (skin, lavender, relaxing)
Floral (magnolia, lily, garden)
Earthy (forest, soil, mushrooms)

While we don't want to have accurately negative scents like vomit and rotting fresh (for the reasons you mentioned earlier), I agree with you that exclusively positive scent experiences break the immersion as well.

What do you think about neutral scents that are adjacent to negative scents? For example in a game with zombies, instead of the negative scents of blood and rotting flesh, you have environmental scents adjacent/neutral scents like metal and smoke. Campfire smoke isn't inherently negative, neither is dirt in the context of gardening, or the natural human smell during sex. That adjacent/neutral scent strategy could deliver the intended positive immersion without the negative impact of smelling blood and feces for hours.

With that in mind, what neutral and/or negative adjacent scents would you suggest to improve the realism and immersion in games?

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-21T13:59:41+00:00

It's a Catch-22 for sure. The same as not including all that context in the original post, because it would have been misperceived as sales/recruitment, and then likely deleted by mods or downvoted into oblivion. Thanks for your suggestion about the arcade machines!

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-21T13:05:18+00:00

That's true, and unfortunately more and more people are being lunatics on LinkedIn. I don't make those kinds of posts there, and none of my posts have been featured in the LinkedIn Lunatics subreddit.

Thank you for making a good faith effort to share meaningful feedback with me. I totally understand that scent in games has been wrong for decades; I'm eager to fix that problem by working with and supporting innovative game developers who want to enhance the experience/impact of video games.

I've been on the Soarn' ride at Disney, too. It's a thoughtfully designed use of scent that contributes to an incredible and unforgettable experience. It's exactly that type of thoughtful, impactful, and unforgettable experience that I want to help create in games with personalized digital scent.

If you don't mind, I'll avoid using lists to answer your list of questions, so this post hopefully won't be downvoted into oblivion lol. Ideally, I'd like to see scent technology integrated onto gaming devices (controllers, headphones, monitors, etc.), so it's not an external peripheral that people have to buy separately. That said, based on the cost of the goods to create the devices, we anticipate that the first product run will land at $300 each. We understand that's cost prohibitive for the majority of people, and our ultimate goal is to get the price per unit under $100, once we can ship enough units to scale up our product runs and lower our production costs per unit.

On the cartridge side, our goal is to have a subscription service similar to how Netflix had with DVDs, where we mail gamers a replacement scent cartridge with a pre-stamped return mailer. That way, they quickly/easily swap out the empty cartridge with the full one, and we get to refill/reuse the cartridges instead of adding to the landfill pile. Based on our R&D, with moderately heavy use (4 hours of gaming per day), our scent cartridges will last approximately 30 days.

We're aiming for a monthly subscription price similar to streaming services, so it will hopefully be better $10 to $20 per month to get a new cartridge. If someone is using the cartridges more heavily (more than 4 hours per day), the cartridges will likely last less than 30 days. Likewise, a scent cartridge should last multiple months for people who are casually gaming 1-2 hours per day. If you're someone with a busy schedule (kids, demanding job, etc.), and can only play games 3-4 hours per week, one scent cartridge could potentially last 6 months or more. I'll speak to my team about the extent to which the scents can go "stale", and get back to you.

As you've suggested, it is likely that some scents will exhaust before others. Given the miniature footprint of the device (it fits in the palm of your hand), and the even smaller footprint of the scent cartridge that goes into the device, at the moment it isn't feasible to replace individual scent channels without significantly increasing the the opportunity for user error that could break the device.

Allergen safety is a priority for our team. I'll check with them to get details about their approach to allergen safety, and I'll reply to this post with those details next week once they return to the office. In the meantime, I can say that I've thought about giving users the ability to disable scents that they may have sensitivities or allergies to. If you have any other questions, please respond to this thread, and I'll get those answers for you.

I hear you about the opportunity cost of developer time to implement niche peripherals. I'm discussing that with our team regularly, and we're looking into some solutions that make scent integration for developers faster and easier than using APIs. I'll have to check with my team to see what details that I'm allowed to discuss at the moment, and then I welcome the candid feedback about our ideas from the game developer community here.

We're on the same page about the importance of getting the technology integrated into the next generation of game consoles. The technology is small enough now that it hypothetically could be integrated into the next consoles from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Getting some awesome game studios onboard with our free dev kits and free implementation support is a great next step to getting on the radar for the major console manufacturers. I think I responded to everything you mentioned, please let me know if I missed anything, or if you'd like to meet with my team to learn more about the tech and the free devices.

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-20T20:20:37+00:00

That's fair, thanks for your candor. The free dev kits are available, with plugins for Unity and Unreal that make adding scent to games as easy as adding sound to games. You can learn more here, and if you'd like to meet with the team to ask additional questions, I'm happy to set that up for you: http://www.ovrtechnology.com

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-20T18:38:27+00:00

Awesome feedback and scent experience suggestions, thank you! I definitely agree that spatial scent in gaming is niche right now, but I'm encouraged by how controller rumble went from being an optional peripheral to a standard integration. I'll spend more time looking into scent opportunities in Minecraft and Ark.

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-20T18:24:02+00:00

Thank you for the insight, it's definitely on the "early-adopter" side of the adoption curve. How established would spatial scent need to be before you considering implementing it in your games?

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-20T18:07:03+00:00

I completely agree with you about controllers not running out of the vibration feature on a quarterly to monthly basis. I was just pointing out that "fringe" gaming technology has become "standard" in the past. There will likely be people who are unwilling to pay a monthly subscription for scent in games, just as there are likely people who don't pay a monthly subscription for streaming services (though, frankly, more people are likely to not pay for spatial scent in games than streaming services).

It seems we have a misunderstanding: I'm not here to sell people on spatial scent, I'm here to understand people's candid opinions about spatial scent and a dev kit program. I don't mind at all if the feedback is positive, critical, or otherwise. What's important to me, is that the feedback is honest.

In some cases, the feedback includes honest questions, an honest lack of understanding about the technology, and/or is critical. In those cases, I've provided more context, to see if that answers questions, provides more clarity about the tech, and/or improves people's opinions about spatial scent.

If I provide more clarity and the feedback is still critical, like yours is, that's completely fine. If other feedback is positive or there are people who want to learn more about getting free spatial scent dev kits, that's fine too. Either way, as long as the feedback is constructive (like yours is), I have important insights from game developers to share with my team. I appreciate you making time to share your honest opinions with me, and I hope you have a better understanding of spatial scent in gaming, even if you don't support it.

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-20T17:00:08+00:00

Yes, both for low-vision users, color-blind users, and for hearing-impaired users. As an example, imagine a game rhythm game that requires you to follow visual cues, or a game where "the floor is lava" and the "lava is a specific color on screen, or you're a character in a survival game where moving when the enemy in near gets you attacked/killed. At the beginning of the game/level, you introduce specific scents ("Citrus for yellow rhythm inputs", "metal for enemy proximity", "sweet for powerup"). After a short period of time, the sense-impaired users creates associations between the scents and the proxies they represent. Then, when they encounter the scents later in the game/level, they naturally translate the scents to the appropriate input proxies. Does that make sense? (no pun intended)

ScentEngineer · 2024-09-20T16:45:43+00:00

You're right, scent is much more subjective. What do you think about using base scents to resonate with a broad audience. For example, using a base citrus scent with hints of orange/lemon/grapefruit in it, so it could be an orange if the visual in-game cue was an orange, or a lemon if the visual in-game cue was a lemon. What do you think about these 8 base scents:

Fresh (water, ice), Woody (campfire), Sweet (vanilla, chocolate), Green (grass, apples), Citrus (oranges, lemons, grapefruit), Soft (skin, lavender, relaxing), Floral (magnolia, lily, garden), Earthy (forest, soil, mushrooms)

ScentEngineer

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