A new USB peripheral that emits smells is about to hit the PC market and the console version is ‘in the works’. Developed by Scent Sciences Corporation, the machine plugs in to your gaming device of choice and when triggered will emit one of up to twenty different fragrances including pine forest, ocean and smoke.
ScentScape will be released for the PC by the end of the year and will retail in the US for $69.99 with additional cartridges clocking in at $24 each. The product has only been demonstrated on the PC but Scent Sciences Corporation say it will be “compatible with all major formats”.
Each cartridge should last around 200 hours and will have a ‘volume control’ to allow personal preference of pong strength.
Whilst ‘pine forest’ may be an excellent choice for games such as World of Warcraft, I’m wondering if they may have to adjust the twenty inbuilt pongs for the console market. For example, Call of Duty would benefit from aromas of sweat, oil, gunpowder and napalm and Dante’s Inferno would require vomit, bile and decomposing corpses. Yum.
Source: MCV / Scentscape
gideon1451
This is a joke, right?
mcphatty
Got to be! Do you remember ‘scratch and sniff’ from the nineties? Every one of them smelt of burning arse hair. Much like the Gran Turismo 2 Arcade disk. Bad idea all round!
Rad4Life
Fail. We don’t need this. I don’t see many people saying they even want this. The video game industry needs to take notice. The more difficult you make it for us to play our games, the less we will play our games. I am 25 and have been gaming since I could hold a controller. I have a full time job, go to college, and have a kid. I don’t need another device to plug up when I wanna game. So on second thought…EPIC FAIL!
RudeAwakening
ship it to the bottomless pit of crappy inventions!
HandBanana
Dosen’t the xbox 360 already have the burning smell built in? ;)
hazelam
i like the almondy smell on new ps3 games, but that’s about as much smelling i really want to do with regards to games.
with some of the games that are popular these days.
just imagine monster hunter, where you have root around in the creature’s dung piles. :(
bigdon23
“cartridges clocking in at $24 each.” or a couple of quid from B&M (made by glade lol)
It sounds all nice but its a gimic that wont be used after the first couple of weeks