A new study showed that Video games Virtual reality can be brought to life with scents designed to match the movement, as volunteers played virtual reality game Resident Evil 7 Biohazard, with or without smells that compliment parts of the game, and scenes in this survival horror game feature highly smelly things like rotten food, smoke, and a rotting head.
And according to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”, researchers found that adding smells significantly increases people’s sense of being in the game environment.
The new study was conducted by researchers at the Australian government agency CSIRO and the University of Technology Sydney, who say in their paper: “VR headsets provide immersive audio and visual experiences for users, but typically neglect to provide olfactory cues that can provide additional information about our real-world environment. ”.
The results indicate that adding scents to the VR environment had a significant impact on both the psychological and physiological experience, which indicates that adding the scent enhanced the VR environment.
The researchers conducted the study on 22 people who explored the same virtual reality environment as Resident Evil 7, 13 of the participants had previous experience with virtual reality and only three participants had no experience playing any video games, and the game was enhanced with smells generated by the olfactory scale, which The volatile odor is transmitted through a soft plastic tube installed under the participant’s nose.
One of the volatiles was cis-3-hexen-1-ol, an oily liquid that smells like fresh grass, to enhance the feeling of being in the woods.
The other type is dimethyl trisulfide, a decomposition product of bacterial decomposition, including the early stages of human decomposition to reveal the dead in the game.
Participants walked in the same VR environment twice, with or without the introduction of scent stimuli, and immediately after each game, participants completed a questionnaire to determine their “sense of presence” from the overall gameplay, as well as their sense of immersion in each scene.
The results showed that adding scents significantly increased the participants’ sense of spatial presence in the VR environment compared to the VR without scent.
The team says that scents provide an opportunity to create a more immersive experience to increase a person’s presence in a virtual reality environment, and write: “In addition to gaming, the findings have broader applications for virtual training environments.”