Tokyo Startup Vaqso Aims To Help You Smell Inside VR
Did you ever find yourself thinking, maybe, say, when you’re in the middle of a terrifying game of Brookhaven, “I wonder what that zombie smells like?”
Of course you have! Who hasn’t wanted to know what a zombie smells like? Good thing then for all of us that Tokyo-based startup Vaqs has created an odor-omitting gadget that’s meant to be attached to VR headsets. About the size of a Snickers bar, the Vaqso device will eventually be able to emit numerous scents, which will be able to be synced up with a corresponding VR experience. If that’s not cool enough for you, the device also is equipped with a small fan which, when operating in conjunction with the VR content, can make the scents stronger or weaker, depending on the user’s movement.
I know that it seems strange to think that your headset may be claiming victory over yet another one of your senses, but considering the amount of venture capital being dumped into the company by Weru Investment, I think it’s fair to say that you’re going to be smelling that zombie sooner than you might think.
Okay, so let’s say you don’t want to smell zombies because you’re convinced it is surely not going to be a pleasant experience. So why then would you bother with something like Vaqso? Well, the truth is, to date the virtual reality experience has been very successful in overwhelming the sense of sight and sound, but VR designers understand that for the virtual world to truly replicate the real world, all five senses eventually must to come into play. And your sense of smell, believe it or not, can trigger memories and emotions in ways other senses cannot.
Whether it’s the crisp fall air or the perfume of a lost love, smell is a more powerful thing than most people imagine and despite earlier failed experiments to tie scent to content (you probably don’t remember Smell-O-Vision but what about scratch and sniff cards?), the draw of a new kind of experience for the VR enthusiast is probably too great to ignore.
And it’s happening whether you like it or not. There are not only projects out there like Birdy, which combine touch and scent, but competitors to Vaqso in the smell game, such as Feelreal and Noslus Rift, meaning that this is probably not a fad and more likely a sign of how the future of VR is going to shape out.
And as the technology inevitably improves and it becomes harder to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not, the digital experiences will be truly mind-blowing. And when you can not only see and hear, but smell and taste and touch what is merely “virtual”, when it’s hard to distinguish between life and a virtual reality arcade, that’s when VR fulfills its true potential.