I saw the future and it literally stinks
Weird Weekend
Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it’s the canon height of Thief’s Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
PC gaming, as a hobby, is a vast desert of inessentials. You want lights on your keyboard? Lights on your RAM? A graphics card that emits cherry vapour and has an anime lady on it? All these things and more can be yours, for the low price of an alarmingly high price.
But when I took a Gamescom appointment to check out the Scentbar, I felt like I was plumbing an entire new stratum of frippery. The pitch is simple: stick this miniature soundbar-ish thing on your desk, run a bit of software that detects what’s happening on your screen, et voila, it will start kicking out stinks that match the action.
This is, somehow, an idea that has been attempted several times before. But from reading my colleagues’ reactions to those prior efforts, I get the impression they, ah, sucked.
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So here are my two key takeaways from my Gamescom Scentbar demo: first, you absolutely, comprehensively, definitively do not need to buy this thing and almost certainly should not. Second, I have to admit it works, to a degree I find myself impressed by essentially against my will.
Swing and a whiff
My demo of the Scentbar began in a bakery—a first-person perspective of someone (a baker, you have to assume) dashing around a cosy-game-coded space and rearranging croissants. This, happily, was quickly recognised by the Scentbar’s AI-detection gubbins, which quickly began emitting a distinctly bakery-like odour.
The hardware side of it works like this: the little soundbar thing that sits on your desk can be equipped with up to 10 cartridges, each of which is filled with a distinct set of scent pellets. For my demo, it was loaded with Forest, Grass, Pineapple, Flowers, Bakery, Sea, Farm, Garage, Smoke, and Gunpowder. Bakery, naturally, kicked in for the croissant-focused segments of the demonstration. When Salomo Bertram, the Scentbar boss who was showing this stuff off, started throwing bombs about in another game, the bar emitted gunpowder. In a car mechanic sim? Garage. You get it.
I do not know by what magic the world’s scent-makers have produced a tiny white pellet that smells 100% like ‘garage,’ but they sure as hell have done, and the same goes for the rest of the Scentbar’s arsenal of odours. Precisely how much the Scentbar AI has to ‘recognise’ what it’s seeing before it starts spitting out a relevant smell is configurable by its software.
If you want, you can have it emit gunpowder at the merest hint of a weapon on screen, or you can set it to more-or-less require a notarised form from the government affirming the presence of gunplay before it even thinks about it. In this way, says Bertram, you can “set it up to your preferences and individualize your experience,” but you can’t add your own smells yet, due to “safety issues.”
Alas, Bertram had not brought his fish or faeces pellets with him to Gamescom, which meant I could not get direct experience of the Scentbar’s capacity to produce foul smells. I did see/smell it accurately parse Minecraft’s blocky forestry, though—correctly pumping out the smells of grass and fir trees as we swanned about in creative mode.
In a game called Lost Legion—which did not seem great—I got to inhale the scent of a burning Roman soldier as I stood the game’s protagonist in a roaring brazier. Well, okay, I got the smell of fire. ‘Burning flesh’ was not loaded into the Scentbar and probably should never be.
You absolutely, definitely do not need a machine that lets you smell your games, and if a loved one ever came to me asking if they should pick one up, I would encourage them to fill whatever spiritual void had led to them asking me that question.
Nevertheless.
I can’t help but be rather impressed by the Scentbar. It’s a patently ridiculous idea, but it’s a patently ridiculous idea that does seem to function quite well. If you ever find yourself with a free half-hour at an enormous games industry convention, there are worse things you could do with it than check one out.
