‘Aroma Shooter’ Lets You Smell Movies & Video Games As Though You’re Living Them
Movies and games these days have been able to take advantage of technology to make visuals and storytelling as immersive as possible. Often, you might even feel like you’re right there partaking in the story with the characters themselves. But are you ready for an experience so immersive you’ll be able to smell the video you’re watching?
With its latest invention, the ‘Aroma Shooter’, Japanese-based Aromajoin is adding a new layer to the viewing experience. First debuted at CES 2023, the device can “digitalize aromas and create a new communication channel in the same family as text, images, and audio.”
The futuristic dream of being able to smell things through a screen has been tossed around for decades, with different inventions coming in to try and achieve this pipe dream. But is the Aroma Shooter the answer we’ve been waiting for?
The gadget comes with a cartridge, described as a solid-state device, that can “toggle between scents in 0.1 seconds and blend scent permutations instantly with no lingering sensations.”
The shooter sucks in the air from your surroundings and puffs out a scent towards you that mimics what is happening on screen.
For example, in the demo video from Aromajoin, the company used two anime programs. The first show, called Quintessential Quintuplets, was tagged with scents such as cherry blossoms, grapes, and peaches, matching the series’s aesthetic and vibe. The next was the video-game-turned-anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, which apparently smells like smoke, caramel, coffee, and clove bud.
Under its database, different scents are attributed to the synopsis of various shows and games to give the viewers a sense of what the world would smell like if they were in it themselves.
Though, suppose you feel like the predetermined fragrances aren’t quite cutting it—in that case, you can also create your own smelling experience by linking a YouTube video to the software and attaching scents to timecodes in the video for the shooter to puff out at you.
All in all, being able to smell your movies and video games could add a new aromatic layer to content you love and would like to delve deeper into. Regardless, it’s hard to see the practicality of it on a day-to-day basis where you’ll have to carry the Aroma Shooter around and have it spray the fragrance of cherry blossoms or smoke in your face.
If that smells like something you might enjoy, however, the Aroma Shooter 2 comes with six aroma cartridges for US$998, with extra additional cartridges at US$54 each.
Take a look at how it works in the video below.
