Image credit: OVR Technology
The senses most commonly associated with gaming are generally sight and sound, with touch as a third option if you consider haptics or controller rumbles. One sense that’s often left out of the conversation is scent.
A team that’s on a quest to change this is OVR Technology, with their cassette-based Omara device. The Omara is a bite-sized personal display tool that adds scent to gaming. I sat down with the OVR team to learn more about this fascinating device and the journey that brought it to life.
How scent can transform the gaming world
Introducing smell into games feels like a novel concept at first, but once you spend time considering it, it feels like a logical next step for immersive gameplay. The team at OVR Technology sat down with me to examine this further and discuss their latest piece of tech – the small but mighty Omara.
I spoke with Sam Wisniewski, the President and Cofounder, and Sara Socia, the Director of Fragrance Innovation and R&D, to learn more about why scent is so important for the future of gaming.
To start, I wondered how the pair had gotten involved with OVR. Wisniewski explained that the founding team came from a variety of different backgrounds and disciplines, but that he and another business partner came specifically from the world of flavour and fragrance.
“It really was just one of those fortuitous, fun conversations where you get to say, what if?” He mused, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if scent could be involved in the digital landscape?”
Wisniewski added that the initial conversation had happened about eight years prior, and since then, the team had been focused on making sure the technology did what it said on the tin.
Socia shared that her academic roots in neuroscience played a role in her OVR journey, saying, “There’s always been a theme of sensory sciences throughout my career, I’ve done research looking at chemotherapy for the taste system, I’ve worked… developing flavors and fragrances for contract manufacturers.”
With OVR, she shared, it’d all come together in quite a serendipitous way, with the collision of sensory science and innovation being particularly intriguing.
The team faced a number of challenges in their journey to bringing the Omara device to life, with Wisniewski sharing that two key ones stood out in his mind.
First, the technological requirements for the scent perception device involved a lot of elaborate, detailed work; it’s not just the case of plugging the Omara into the wall and letting the smell cassette work like an air freshener and a fan might.
“The other challenge is the education that goes with what scent can truly be,” Wisniewski added, “…Getting people to understand and really be excited about what can be done when it’s used correctly.”
Socia continued, “I think it’s a huge nod to our engineers… to what Sam was saying about that precise delivery and to be able to have the scent clear away very quickly.”
“Because our device is so small, and so compact, and the way that our engineers thought about how to make the development of the underlying technology of the product,” she explained, “It allows for the synchronization of the visuals and the smells to come together.”
Not just roses and rainwater
As someone who can’t get enough horror games in their life, I was intrigued by how the Omara might work with my favorite games – think ROUTINE or Project Songbird.
“Yeah, the smell of dead bodies isn’t something that you’re going to want to experience more than once,” Wisniewski joked, “But there’s really artful ways to add the scent to the areas before you’re about to be in a battle to help you relax…
“Or bringing in those subtle scent cues to let you know something the same way sound lets you know something scary is going to happen, using scent as a very subtle trigger in the background that you might not even fully notice, but it’s helping build the tension.”
Socia stepped back to look at the wider variety of scents the Omara currently offers, noting that the current offerings are referred to as the common scent pack. Most of them were on the pleasant side, but some were neutral or perhaps unsettling.
“We’re also including things like barnyard or smoky,” she explained, “Which are scents that you wouldn’t necessarily have a candle of, but are still not something people are going to immediately be like, yuck!
The team had developed malodours in the past – think bad-smelling things like garbage – but were conscious that people wouldn’t want to smell them regularly. Instead, the aim was to use them ever-so-sparingly for a real impact.
To wrap up the conversation, I wanted to know about how the pair stayed inspired with their work at OVR Technology.
“There’s something interesting about doing something that’s so new and novel,” Wisniewski noted, “…Seeing something resonate or hit someone that’s a truly new experience is such a rare thing in the world.”
Socia shared that the sensory sciences and the wider sensory experience were utterly joyful to her, saying that bringing the sense of smell into digital spaces for the sake of human connection was something that really inspired her.
“To be able to have that intersection, that interdisciplinary element of a new frontier of a new knowledge space is quite exciting,” She mused, highlighting the wide variety of experiences and disciplines encompassed in the OVR team.
The Omara is an intriguing piece of technology that seems like it’ll add a new level of immersion to cozy games, survival games, and – despite it seeming unreal as a fan of the genre – even horror games. It’s a new area of the gaming-technology industry that I can’t wait to see more of in the future.
FAQs
The Omara, made by OVR Technology, is a personal display device. It uses scent-based cassettes to deliver short bursts of scent, synced with games to offer an immersive experience.
According to the OVR website, there are currently 16 different smells the Omara can provide, ranging from citrus to desert.
While it’s largely uncommon at the time of writing, releases like the Omara point to scent being a bigger part of the gaming world down the line. Currently, though, it’s generally not possible to smell things in games.
The most immersive games vary from person to person. Some may find survival games like ICARUS or even Pokopia immersive, while others may find horror games like Dead Space or ROUTINE more engrossing.
About The Author
