Pod Insights The Vergecast The smells and tastes of a great video game About this episode Today on the flagship podcast of refillable scent cartridges:
Producer Andru Marino tries out a gadget called the Gamescent, an AI-powered scent machine that syncs with your gaming and movie watching experience. He walks David Pierce through the experience and whether integrating olfaction could be the future of gaming.
We also hear from Nimesha Ranasinghe, an assistant professor at the University of Maine working on taste sensations and taste simulation in virtual reality experiences, which can lead to adding another sense into the world of gaming.
Further reading:
A Brief History of Smell-O-Vision
“Scent of Mystery”, the First and Only Use of Smell-O-Vision
The sights, smells, and sprays of ‘Iron Man 3’ in 4DX
The iSmell story
Smell-O-Vision is REAL: Linus Tech Tips
VR pioneer Jaron Lanier on dystopia, empathy, and the future of the internet
The sense of taste in virtual reality
Virtual lemonade sends colour and taste to a glass of water
Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.
0:09 Speaker 01 I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand," when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.
0:17 Speaker 00 Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.
0:32 David Pierce? Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of refillable scent cartridges. I'm your friend David Pierce, and this is the third episode in our four-episode series, sponsored by Visible Wireless, about the five senses of gaming. So like I said, this is the third one of five senses. The last one was about hearing. We talked about audio-only video games. The one before that was touch. We talked about the N64 joystick crisis. Both super fun episodes. If you haven't listened to them, go do so. But I would be lying to you if I said this is not the episode I was the most excited about. We gave our producer Andrew Marino, I would say, the roughly impossible task of taking the two senses that make the least sense in the context of this series and trying to figure them both out.
1:14 David Pierce? Those two senses are taste and smell. How do you do that in games? Let's find out. Andrew Marino, welcome.
1:22 Speaker 03 Hi, hi, David.
1:23 David Pierce? You knew I was gonna give you this episode, didn't you?
1:25 Speaker 03 I would have fought for it.
1:28 David Pierce? I'm glad. So where do you want to start? I feel like we just sort of sent you on a, like, God only knows where this is gonna go adventure. Let's see what you can come up with.
1:36 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:37 David Pierce? Where do you want to start?
1:38 Speaker 03 Okay, so let's just bring up the idea of where smell would even go in this stuff, right? So you may remember the term smell-o-vision.
1:47 David Pierce? Oh, yeah.
1:48 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:49 David Pierce? I honestly could not tell you if that's a real thing that ever existed or not, but I have heard of smell-o-vision before.
1:55 Speaker 03 Yeah, people just use it as a term for, like, broadcasting smells, you know? But it was actually a product at one point. There was a movie in 1960 called The Scent of Mystery.
2:14 Speaker 03 And it was a movie that used this technology called spell vision. They had like this whole machine built where there was like, kind of like how a soundtrack in a film strip would be like, there's just triggers for when scents would come. Throughout the film, there was like 15 scents that were deployed into the audience. So there was a villain in the movie who smoked a pipe. So whenever that villain was on screen, you could smell the tobacco from his pipe. And it was supposed to be like the future of cinema. They were just like, we got sound, we got visuals. Now we gotta add another thing and that's smell.
2:51 David Pierce? The other important part of movies.
2:53 Speaker 03 Now, like you still kind of see that. I don't know if you've ever been to one of those 4DX theater experiences.
3:00 David Pierce? Those are the ones with like the, the seats that rumble when there's action sequences and stuff, right? To that extent, I think 4DX is super fun. But every time there's one of these, I remember this thing from, it was the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids thing at Disney World, which to me is like the canonical version of all of this to me. And there's a moment in it where a bunch of rats are scurrying around and they actually had the rats scurry underneath you and it freaked me out, like genuinely earnestly scared me.
3:27 Speaker 03 I am still scarred from that. It's so funny you brought that up. I remember the tails, there's tails on the bottom of the chair.
3:33 David Pierce? It's awful. I don't like it at all. And so that forever has ruined the idea of 4DX for me, even though I think the like rumble when you're in the car thing is actually pretty cool.
3:42 Speaker 03 Yeah, a lot of them don't do the scents. Apparently there's a theater in Japan that has like a thousand different scents you can load into a movie. But we're talking about video games here. So how do we do this in video games?
3:55 David Pierce? Yeah, that seems like a really different problem to me.
3:58 Speaker 03 Yeah.
3:58 David Pierce? You can't just like load the track with the smells, I guess.
4:01 Speaker 03 Right, because it's so interactive. Once we got into like the desktop era of computers, there was this company called iSmell.
4:09 David Pierce? Amazing.
4:09 Speaker 03 Which is just an amazing name for.
4:13 David Pierce? And this is in the nineties, so they were, they were ahead of their time on iSmell.
4:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, in 1999, there was like a USB device you'd plug into your computer. It would work with like websites and programmers to install these like smell activation files, where it would release a scent when you click on something in a game or a website. Yeah, imagine Tomb Raider, you're going through different spots and smelling mold and mildew and animals and tapestries. And the shoot 'em up game, of course, that can get pretty gross. When you say this game stinks, it might be a compliment. That never took off. In 2006, PC World Magazine listed iSmell as one of the worst tech products of all time.
4:54 David Pierce? Oof, that's tough.
4:56 Speaker 03 So there's a, you know, there's a lot of challenges there. I don't know if people were ready for scent in video games. We're still, you know, we're still getting the visuals and sound right at that point. But now, technology has progressed, David.
5:10 Speaker 04 Guys, guys, guys, guys, okay. Smell-O-Vision, it's real.
5:15 Speaker 03 There's been lots of prototypes I've seen. Linus Tech Tips did a video with something called the Celia, which worked with a game called Adventure Climb VR.
5:24 Speaker 04 Oh my god, I can to- I can totally smell the water.
5:31 Speaker 03 This fan will blow scents on you if you're in like the wooded area or like near water.
5:36 Speaker 04 Okay.
5:37 Speaker 03 There's some innovative stuff there. But I actually found one product that is shipping, does add scent to your game, and they promise to work with any video game console and any streaming platform. It's called Game Scent. Have you heard of this?
5:53 David Pierce? I'm guessing this is the sort of thing that we would have seen and been like, well, that'll never amount to anything, and then just all sort of forgot about in this long history of smell products.
6:02 Speaker 03 Yeah.
6:02 David Pierce? But you're telling me it's real?
6:04 Speaker 03 It's real. We're here. Smell-O-Vision is back in games. It's made by a company called Elevated Perceptions. You can buy it right now on Amazon. You can hook it up to your Xbox, you can hook it up to your Switch or whatever. It's like this hexagon box that you hook up to your console. It has six spray nozzles, each with a different fragrance. So when you're playing a game, it will just eject some, it's like an oil diffuser.
6:30 David Pierce? Okay, sure.
6:32 Speaker 03 And it's powered by AI.
6:35 David Pierce? Oh, God. Andrew, well, that's the end of the episode.
6:38 Speaker 03 No, David, hear me out. AI is going to solve smell vision.
6:44 David Pierce? Okay.
6:44 Speaker 03 We're finally at a point where this is actually going to work. Because, you know, previously in all these examples I talked about, you have to map it to the game, to the movie before you play it, you know?
6:56 David Pierce? Like the track you're talking about, it actually doesn't work if you don't have the like cue points for the scents.
7:03 Speaker 03 Exactly. So you'd have to work with the video game developer. You'd have to work with the movie distributor to sync everything. But what GameScent is doing instead is you're actually just running an audio signal to the GameScent from your game console through this little adapter, which syncs to that hexagon box called the atomizer. And so the adapter is listening to the sound in the game, sending it to a cloud server, and then some AI software is figuring out what those sounds are. And then it tells the atomizer to deploy those scents. So it's related to what you're hearing in the game.
7:38 David Pierce? I can't tell if you just described something really clever or that is like the most hacky hack in the history of hacks. And I think it's actually probably both as I'm thinking about this now.
7:49 Speaker 03 I think so. Yeah, it's super clever because, yeah, you don't have to map it to any game. You can use literally any game. You can watch literally any movie with it.
7:57 David Pierce? It's a lot of smells, though, Andrew. What, what? What are the scents in this thing?
8:02 Speaker 03 It's a lot of smells. The starter pack that comes with it is gunfire, racing cars, explosions, forest, storm, and then a neutralizing scent or called clean air scent. So those are the six that come in the box.
8:19 David Pierce? I love you can just tell what kind of game and movie they're designing this for, that three of them are just action movie things.
8:27 Speaker 03 Yeah. So like the GameScent hears gunshot noises. It will deploy the gunfire smell. If you hear leaves rustling and birds chirping, you might smell the forest scent from the device. Like if you played this podcast through the GameScent, I'll just play some thunder and rain sounds right now.
8:50 Speaker 03 The game scent should hear that and then it will deploy the storm scent. So they want people to use this for movies and whatever, too.
8:58 David Pierce? Okay, so you mentioned a few minutes ago that this thing is available to buy on Amazon. I'm begging you to tell me that was foreshadowing and that you have one of these things. You can tell me how it works.
9:08 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah, I got I got the game scent. So after this little break we'll have, I'll get into my experience with using the game scent and see how it actually does with Smell-O-Vision in 2024.
9:19 David Pierce? Oh, my God, the suspense is killing me. All right, we'll be right back.
9:26 Speaker 00 Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them. That's bullspend and marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.
9:36 Speaker 01 I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it it wasn't.
9:43 Speaker 00 Cut the bullspend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.
9:58 David Pierce? All right, we're back. Andrew Marino, you have a game scent in your life right now, and you have not told me about it. I am desperate to know about your experience with the game scent. How'd it go?
10:08 Speaker 03 Yeah, I was so excited to play with this. I reached out to GameScent and the company sent me a unit to try out for the Vergecast. When I got the package, immediately it had a very strong scent.
10:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think some oil leaked or something because it's very strong.
10:27 Speaker 03 And so as I was opening the glass vials of fragrance, I noticed that one of them was actually shattered. Oh, no.
10:37 Speaker 03 The clean air scent. It's broken. I wonder if that's why it was all oily. What I was smelling was clean air, apparently. Better that than like gunfire or explosions, though, I guess. Yeah, yeah. So all these little vials of oil, they probably should have used different canisters. Like, they're just generic glass containers. You could screw the nozzle spray thing on it. But yeah, so I didn't have the neutralizer scent anymore. But I felt that was okay, because my entire apartment smelled like clean air for a few days. So you just had infinite neutralizer smell for a while. Yeah, exactly. But it was actually pretty easy to set up in my living room.
11:19 Speaker 03 Usually, as you know, devices that are connected to the internet and Bluetooth can be a pain in the butt. So I was actually surprised how easy it was to set up. I hooked it up to my Nintendo Switch, plug it into the audio adapter. I put the atomizer on my coffee table, and I was sitting on the couch, plugged it in the wall. And the first game I wanted to try it out with was Mario Kart.
11:45 Speaker 03 For the first lap or two, it wasn't really doing anything. I couldn't smell anything. But then suddenly, something came through outside of that clean air scent. Oh, I'm getting a new smell.
12:01 Speaker 03 Oh, I don't know. I don't know what it is.
12:08 Speaker 03 So it was working, but some of the scents were just like too hard to figure out. Like, storm scent versus forest scent. Can you see the scents coming out, by the way? Like, is there a steam thing coming out? You can see it working. There's like a cloud of puff coming out, and you will smell it, for sure. Even if you can't tell exactly what it is? Yeah. Eventually, it started to make sense. Oh, I'm getting a very burnt kind of smell. I think that's the racing cars. I'm on the third lap, and it just triggered that. So it kind of smells like burning tire.
12:46 Speaker 03 I got the racing car smell from playing Mario Kart. As you can expect, that just kept going off for a bit.
12:53 David Pierce? Yeah, it's just racing cars the whole time.
12:55 Speaker 03 Right, because you're always hearing turbo boosts and engines revving and all that. Some other things I would activate the game sent during Mario Kart was Grumble Volcano. That course, there's like an erupting volcano in the beginning and that deployed the explosion scent. Bullet Bill, that big bullet that whizzes past you or hits you, depending where you are in the race. That got the gunfire scent. Oh, this is a new smell.
13:24 Speaker 03 Very smoky smell. So overall, it does work. I also played this with Animal Crossing. I know these are probably not the best case scenarios, but they said you could use it with anything.
13:36 David Pierce? Yeah.
13:36 Speaker 03 I got the forest scent immediately when I was in Animal Crossing on my island. I have a lot of trees. So overall, it does kind of work.
13:44 David Pierce? Does it add anything though? Like, does it? Do you feel like it made Mario Kart more exciting or immersive to have this working?
13:52 Speaker 03 Yeah, I don't think so. I think maybe if I'm using it longer over time and I'm not noticing it. Like if I crashed horribly in Mario Kart, I smell that burning tire scent. It might be a little bit more powerful. Also, you kind of have to have the atomizer fairly close to you to like immediately smell it when it happens. If you put it a little too far away from you, it might take a bit for the scent to come up. But if it's more experiential environment thing, you may not change scents very often. Like if you're in a forest in Zelda or something, you're probably there for a long time. But I'm not sure if it's all there yet. Like I'm not more immersed in Mario Kart.
14:38 David Pierce? Well, I kind of, I have sort of two theories about that. One is that maybe the problem is just that smell doesn't work like sound does. Like, it sort of sounds like you're saying, like, what if the soundtrack of the movie just played constantly for an hour? And I was like, well, then it wouldn't do anything, right? The fact that you can play music at specific points that does specific things is actually really powerful in a way that just diffusing oil into the air, you just don't have that kind of control.
15:02 Speaker 03 Right.
15:03 David Pierce? But also then I'm like, what if there were just way more smells? What if instead of six, it was like 6,000? And it could be like, small explosion, big explosion, you're dying in the explosion. Maybe, maybe we just, instead of doing less of this, we need to do much, much, much more of it.
15:19 Speaker 03 That's what I think. I think six scents are not enough. And technically, it's five, because there's like the neutralizing odor. So I don't think it's, there's enough yet for a full immersive experience. But I talked to the people at GameScent. They were experimenting with daisy chaining a bunch of these. So you can buy a bunch and maybe put, you know, multiples of six scents in your gaming setup.
15:45 David Pierce? So like forest plus gunshot equals war?
15:51 Speaker 03 Oh, totally. And they do plan on adding more scents to swap out. Right now on the website, it says there will be a ocean scent, a sports arena scent, fresh cut grass. There's a zombie smell that's gonna be coming. That's what they told me.
16:07 David Pierce? This is my new favorite job in the tech industry that I am desperate to know much more about is the smell designers for video games. That's a, that's a life goal right there.
16:18 Speaker 03 Yeah, they work with a third-party company to like, design these custom scents for the GameScent. So it's not just these stock ones that they just buy, you know? But I would love for them to make like a bundle for certain games. If there was like a Mario Kart bundle, I could have a racing car scent and like a banana scent for the banana peels in the game. And then an ink smell for when you get bloopered. That would be cool. And you could, you know, have different packs for different games.
16:45 David Pierce? That's a really fun idea. You, you buy the- $70 game and for 15 more dollars, you get all the game smells.
16:52 Speaker 03 Yeah.
16:52 David Pierce? I like weirdly feel like that would work.
16:54 Speaker 03 I think so too. And I talked to the president of the company and the VP of marketing at the company about this. And they like want to work with companies and movie production houses to make custom scents for games and movies. They said they would love to partner with like Dune and figure out what the spice smells like in Dune, you know?
17:13 David Pierce? Ah, that's, that's very compelling.
17:15 Speaker 03 Yeah. So David, would you use something like this for movies or games?
17:21 David Pierce? I think games, I actually find more interesting than movies. And I think actually your spice example is sort of the perfect one where to me, the idea of having like lots of different smells kind of coming and going as you play a game or watch a movie. It's probably just too hard to pull off, like just because of what you're talking about, like it has to diffuse oil into the air at a particular time. But if I could sit down to play Dune and it just kind of smelled a little like spice. It's like, you know how when the room smells like popcorn, like every movie is a little more enjoyable. Like it's just that little thing that if I could just kind of, or the thing people do where they like sync up the lights to the movie.
17:56 Speaker 03 Yeah.
17:57 David Pierce? Just having that one little additional thing where instead of having everything on screen have a smell. You can just sort of have the game have a smell or like the world, like the, you mentioned the fresh cut grass thing. And like, I play a lot of FIFA and the idea of having that where I can sort of feel like I'm on a pitch, even though I can't smell the sweaty dude next to me, it just kind of smells like I'm on a soccer field. That kind of does something for me and feels maybe slightly more achievable. I'm just not convinced that the like soundtrack a game with smells thing is even technically possible. But I hope I'm wrong. Like I, I love the idea. I think it's great that people have been working on this for like, what 50 years now? I think it'd be awesome if it worked. I'm just not convinced it will.
18:38 Speaker 03 Like even in that movie I mentioned, The Scent of Mystery, there was like a point where it will deploy a perfume scent of one of the characters that was off screen. And so you knew this character was about to come in kind of thing. So there's like a storytelling aspect to it that you could totally take advantage of.
18:56 David Pierce? I love that. You can, you can smell the bad guy before the bad guy appears on screen.
19:00 Speaker 03 Oh, totally. Yeah. This is great foreshadowing.
19:02 David Pierce? It really is. Yeah, I want one. I'm like, this thing is on Amazon, which is a real problem because I'm now tempted to buy it just because of the sheer sort of delightful silliness of the whole thing. Are you going to keep using yours now that you don't have to for the Vergecast anymore? Do you think it'll still stay hooked up to the Switch?
19:19 Speaker 03 Probably not until they get new scents, I think. It's pretty strong overall, and after a while, it's like, eh, I actually don't want to smell this forest smell. A lot of it's very perfumey so far.
19:32 David Pierce? Has it lingered in your apartment? Like, do you come home and you're like, mm, smells like burnt tires?
19:37 Speaker 03 Well, the box does. The box with all the oil still inside it.
19:42 David Pierce? That's not great. That's not great.
19:44 Speaker 03 It's okay. It neutralizes a lot of other odors in my apartment.
19:48 David Pierce? It's perfect. I love it.
19:49 Speaker 03 But David, we're not done today. We still have one more scents to talk about.
19:54 David Pierce? Oh, right. Oh, man. Which is, I would say, if anything, I would assume much weirder than this particular journey that you've been on.
20:01 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah, possibly. We'll see. We're going to tackle the question, what if you could taste your games?
20:07 David Pierce? Oh, man.
20:08 Speaker 03 So after this break, we'll get into that.
20:11 David Pierce? I'm so excited. We'll be right back.
20:16 Speaker 00 Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them, that's bullspend, and marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.
20:26 Speaker 01 I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.
20:34 Speaker 00 Cut the bullspend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.
20:49 David Pierce? Welcome back. It's time for maybe the weirdest scents in the five senses of video games: taste. Andrew, it turns out smell has a decades-long history in movies and video games. Does taste? Have there been people trying to make you taste video games since the 70s?
21:07 Speaker 03 Well, so the first time we started talking about this, I remembered this 2017 podcast we did. Our colleague Addie Robertson interviewed Jaron Lanyard, who, you know, is a pioneer in that first phase of VR from the 80s and 90s. At the time, he was promoting a book. In the book, he mentioned this VR taste simulator he tried from a Japanese company, and then he talked about it on the podcast.
21:32 Speaker 05 The next time I was in Japan, I tried this crazy thing and it was really hard to sterilize between users and really hard to initialize and really crazy, but it was like this weird little morphing robot with little chemical squirters and you would stick it in your mouth and start chewing on it.
21:47 Speaker 00 Wait, did it just look like a blob, like a little blob robot?
21:51 Speaker 05 It was like this rubber thing with all these little robotic effectors inside it that could collapse or move and then it had like these little nozzles that would squirt flavors out of little holes in it.
22:02 Speaker 00 I know, that sounds really disgusting.
22:03 Speaker 05 It's absolutely the most repulsive user interface item I have ever seen.
22:07 David Pierce? A, heck of a sales pitch. B, I agree, that does sound sort of disgusting.
22:13 Speaker 03 Yeah, that is bizarre. I would love to have seen what that looks like or I would love to try it, honestly. But you can imagine like something like that is very hard to emulate. Taste, putting something in your mouth, I haven't seen anything remotely close to what he was talking about there, but I did find someone who is working on something in the world of taste simulation.
22:36 Speaker 06 I'm Nimesh Rana Singh. I'm an assistant professor at University of Maine in the School of Computing and Information Science.
22:45 Speaker 03 So I talked to Nimesh. He was previously in this research group at the University of Singapore focusing on human interaction in virtual reality and he specifically was interested in incorporating taste sensation and simulation into this. So the best way that he was figuring it out was through controlling electrical currents and electrical pulses onto your tongue to give different taste sensations. So like, you know, if you lick a battery, if you've ever done that.
23:17 David Pierce? Sure.
23:18 Speaker 03 It's like, kind of like a soury kind of sharp taste. So he built on that idea.
23:23 Speaker 06 So I thought like, maybe we can focus on that and we can fine tune the electrical stimuli, like reduce it to very, very, very low electric current around like 100 microampere. And then start studying like when we change the electric current and the frequency as well as the different areas of the tongue, when we stimulate, how we can sort of relate those electric stimuli, like perception into like actual basic taste perceptions like salty, sour, sweet and bitter sensations mainly.
23:58 Speaker 03 You know, different currents attacking your tongue, maybe changing the temperature to make it hot or cold for like a spicy or minty feeling, you know?
24:07 David Pierce? I had no idea this was like understood science that you could essentially push a taste onto someone's tongue with electrical currents. I guess I shouldn't be surprised by this, but that's very cool to have just learned about just now.
24:21 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's pretty wild. Apparently it works. There was an early prototype they worked on that was like a 3D printed spoon with electronics inside it and little electrodes underneath the spoon. So when you put it on your tongue, it would like zap these sensations.
24:37 David Pierce? Whoa. So you you bite the spoon and it it's like cinnamon toast crunch and then you bite the spoon again and it's like spaghetti.
24:46 Speaker 03 I don't know if it was that advanced, but it was like, oh, maybe this tastes salty now. This tastes super sweet, you know? They also had like metal chopsticks they worked on. That was like a plus and minus kind of circuit. They tried a soup bowl. All these things, they wanted to make sure it all represented stuff that people were already used to putting in their mouth.
25:07 David Pierce? Sure.
25:08 Speaker 06 We wanted to see like a range of different food items and like a semi-liquid kind of food items like porridge and soups and how we can sort of augment the flavors based on the electrical stimulation.
25:21 Speaker 03 So that kind of thing only manipulates primary taste sensations, like you mentioned, salty, sour. They also realized that individual senses influence each other. So that can be a powerful tool. They started adding like smell to give a more immersive experience in this drinking machine. Much like the game set, you could engage food and drink smells in which totally influences the way you taste. And then also they wanted to incorporate sight. So they're experimenting with color.
25:50 Speaker 06 If you go to a bar, they have this like beautiful like range of colors cocktails. And each and every color sort of gives us like some kind of like a pre sort of conceive or like an idea like this is going to be sweeter, this is going to be sour, this is going to be sweet and sour and bitter, kind of like a some idea, right, based on the look and feel or based on our previous experiences. So we wanted to expand on that idea and then see like how we can create the same beverage, but add the color and taste and smell using the digital controls to see whether we can change the people's perception.
26:27 Speaker 03 So all that idea was made into this invention called the virtual cocktail.
26:33 Speaker 06 So we got like a traditional martini glass and then 3D print like a structure, attach the glass and then we we also had an electronic control system and then like a three smell chambers and then three like air pumps, like the air pumps we use in like fish tanks, like the tiny micro air pumps. We put them inside and then we can release like three different smells on top of the beverage surface. And then on the rim, instead of putting like like a margarita, like a salt or sugar, we put those electrodes and then now we can simulate the sourness or saltiness using the electrodes. And then we also put like an RGB LED to change the color of a beverage.
27:13 Speaker 03 So adding all that stuff together, like actually changed the way you would taste this drink that was basically, you know, it would just be water, you know?
27:21 David Pierce? Yeah, that also sounds like an incredible gaming accessory. I feel like he just described something that I now want every time I do anything.
27:29 Speaker 03 Yeah, I can imagine like in Fortnite, you go into a bar in Fortnite and you're having like this in real life electronic tumbler of water and then you sip it and it syncs with the game like whatever you're tasting, I don't know.
27:42 David Pierce? Yeah, like the mead you drink in like a medieval game actually tastes like mead as you're drinking it. I want this so bad, Andrew, that sounds awesome. Is this a real thing? Did they actually like, they made one of these, it sounds like, is this a real thing?
27:56 Speaker 03 They demoed it at a virtual reality showcase a few years ago in London. It was really popular, a lot of people wrote about it. The Masha said that they spun off the research into another company that is actively working on this thing with the spoon version as well.
28:10 David Pierce? It's very exciting.
28:11 Speaker 03 There's also like another aspect of this that is outside of games. So like, if you want to watch the sodium or the sugar intake in your diet, you can kind of like, you know, have a spoon with oatmeal and like artificially add salt with the spoon electronics. So it's like, oh, now this is a little salty here, even though I'm not adding any salt. And then also just communicating another form of sense to someone.
28:37 Speaker 06 How can we think of like these devices as communication devices? So communication media, for example, like how many times we go to like some other place or some other like the restaurant and wondering like, how can we send this sort of flavor or like the dish to my girlfriend or my wife or like my parents or my sister or brother? Just for them to try. One of the sort of vision I have is also like create kind of like a flavor social media. How can we share flavors? And I mean, we do these kind of things every day, like we take photos and try to upload them into social media and explain things verbally. One of the questions I asked is can we do this in virtual reality environment with these kind of tools integrated?
29:20 Speaker 06 So that you will get like a much more believable sort of being there sensation plus these taste and smell sensations to sort of complete experience.
29:31 David Pierce? That sounds very cool. You know what it makes me think of is I had a conversation with Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, maybe six months into the pandemic. So this is like four years ago now. And I was talking to Eric, like, okay, what's next? We're all doing this now, but we're all rectangles. And he had a bunch of ideas, but then he was like, what I want to have happen is I want to be able to have a cup of coffee and share it with you on Zoom. And I remember having this idea of being like, that is the most bananas thing I have ever heard in my entire life, but also very cool. And I feel like this is, this is how you do it, right? Like this is that same kind of thing. We've gone way past gaming here, but I think that's a, that's a really cool, interesting, scientific way of approaching that idea of like, how do you and I actually share virtual experiences?
30:14 David Pierce? Maybe he's not wrong that between smell and taste, you actually get a pretty long way doing that.
30:19 Speaker 03 I know, I would love to just email you a lemonade. I could sell up a lemonade stand and I could email you the drink.
30:28 David Pierce? Open the email, bite the spoon, lemonade.
30:31 Speaker 03 Yeah.
30:32 David Pierce? I don't know if that's utopia or dystopia, but I'm going to be thinking about that for a really long time.
30:37 Speaker 03 All this stuff seems kind of silly, but when you think about the future of all this, when gaming becomes more immersive, there might be a point where the only thing that really pulls you out of that immersion is like, oh, why doesn't this bar smell like stale beer? Why don't I feel any sensation when I'm restoring my hunger points in Minecraft? Do you think maybe this stuff is just inevitable in video games once we get more immersive?
31:04 David Pierce? I sort of buy the argument, honestly. I think, to me, the first thing we have to solve, and it's going to take a really long time, is the haptic stuff, right? Where I feel like where we are now is the thing that takes you out of it. Almost is no longer the graphics. Like, I feel like with the Vision Pro and even sort of the Quest 3, your brain is in the place that you are pretty successfully. But then you reach out and touch something and there's no sensation of actually touching the thing. Or when you move, it's obvious that you're not in the game moving. So I really do sort of sincerely believe that someday when we want to play video games, we're going to have to put on like full body haptic suits. And I'm actually fine with that future. I think it's going to be awesome. Like, put on your wet suit, put on your headset and like go play Call of Duty. That's a world I'm very excited to live in. But I think you're probably right, that if and when we solve that problem,
31:49 David Pierce? the next thing will be, well, this still doesn't feel like I'm grabbing anything, because all of my other sensations are not there, right? We will have solved sight, we will have solved hearing, and we will have solved touch. And then there's two left. And like, as you know, you've been talking about kind of through this whole segment, like, it's the way that those senses work together that makes them powerful. And also, like, as I'm thinking about this now, the idea that smell could work in my headset actually seems like maybe it solves a bunch of problems that having it work in my living room doesn't.
32:20 Speaker 03 Yeah, when you got this thing right up to your face anyway.
32:23 David Pierce? Yeah, so I think like, I don't know, I'm, this all feels like maybe it's like a 50 year problem and we'll have much bigger things to deal with than smell. But I can sort of see why people continue to care about this.
32:36 Speaker 03 I'm imagining like a whole helmet that has like a straw you're sipping and a thing that goes in your nose and the gauze.
32:43 David Pierce? Yeah, it's the combination of like the two beers on the side of your, on the side of your head in the hat and a camelback that goes to your mouth and like a motorcycle helmet that you're essentially just hotboxing with different smells all the time. And that's just, that's how you play Animal Crossing.
32:58 Speaker 03 Exactly. It's a future I would love to live in.
33:03 David Pierce? This sounds great. Apple, if you're listening, this is how you make the Vision Pro a success. We, Andrew and I just figured it out. We did it.
33:08 Speaker 03 Make it stink.
33:11 David Pierce? All right, Andrew, you did better on this project than I expected anyone possibly could. Uh, this is very fun.
33:17 Speaker 03 Oh, thanks.
33:17 David Pierce? Thank you for going on these bizarre adventures for us.
33:20 Speaker 03 Oh, it was so fun.
33:21 David Pierce? Good. All right. We should get out of here. That is it for the Vergecast. Thank you to Andrew and everybody else who helped us with the show. And thank you as always for listening. Lots more on everything we talked about, including we'll link to Smellavision in the show notes. If you buy it, tell us how you like it and what sense you would like to see. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, email us, [email protected] , call the hotline 866-VERGE11. The show is produced by Andru Marino, Liam James, and Will Poor. Vergecast is a Verge production, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back on Tuesday to talk about Surface stuff and OpenAI stuff. There's a whole lot of news happening, so there's a lot to do on the Vergecast in the next few weeks. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.
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