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Researchers Induce Smells With Ultrasound, No Chemical Cartridges Required
(www.uploadvr.com)
Can't wait for this tech to make it to VR. Imagine playing a zombie VR game, enter a room and immediately smell the zombies, you're at a low level so you just nope out and close the door again. Or playing an rpg and find flowers by smell to craft something. It would also work well in survival games like Dayz. You smell a fire, or find a body, it'd tell you better how long it was since the character died, and could better determine how close the person is that killed the one you found. You could even do interesting things like a dog simulator. You could use that tech to play as a hunting dog or drug/bomb sniffing dog. Cut scenes would become so immersive; burning vehicles in COD, flowers in horizon, exhaust in Gran Turismo, horse shit in RDR, rotting flesh in resident evil, mold in fallout,
Imagine GTA where there's a backyard BBQ and you can wander over and smell the grill while you talk to the homeowner. Then you go around the back and find his kid and some others smoking weed. Go to the bathroom and smell potpourri or febreeze. This would be so cool.
Personally, if I had this tech right now, and the skills needed to develop such a game, my hypothetical top tier game imaginable would be like kind of a grim reaper/soul bounty hunter kind of game. Hear me out. You meander through the world looking like everyone else and are treated as such. But you're the keeper of death or possibly some otherworldly being sent from hell to gather the souls meant to go there. It would be kinda like a mix of cyberpunk 2077 and L.A. noire but smoother, taking in more clues less obviously than either of those games. Imagine being able to smell fear or a rotten soul on them. Meaning they were either recently contacted by the corrupt soul, or are one themselves. It would be open world and there would be missions, but you'd also sniff out evil on random people in the environment. The level of stench being a measure of how clean their soul is and whether or not you can believe what the person is saying. Also, if their soul is clean, they probably don't have much loot on them.
This is very exciting for gamers, assuming it actually happens before worldwide collapse. And the pessimist in me says that it'll never get to gamers because the tech will be used in drones to bust citizens for violating minor infractions.