VR Still Stinks Because It Doesn't Smell

VR STILL STINKS, and its stench has many notes. It reeks of rich white guys, who wildly overfund and consistently overhype the always on the verge of a breakthrough technology. It has a festering funk of entrenched privilege, despite its purveyors’ claims that it fosters empathy and inclusion. It’s too expensive and only getting more so. Meta's and the crypto community’s forays into VR stand to make it more putrid. It also, some complain, smells underbaked: In VR, nobody has legs. But perhaps more than anything, the metaverse stinks because it doesn't smell like anything.

Smell also raises the emotional stakes and situates an experience inside our personal histories. For sight, sound, taste, and touch, a stimulus travels from the sensory organ to the brain’s more evolutionarily recent thalamus, which handles complex processing skills. Smell is different: It’s all old brain. Smells bypass the thalamus, traveling straight from the nose to the olfactory bulbs located behind the spot where eyeglasses rest on your face. This tongue-like protrusion of nerves both processes smells in the brain and is closely entangled with older brain regions, specifically the amygdala, which handles emotions, and the hippocampus, which deals with memory. When an important memory forms, you usually feel emotions. If you’re also smelling something, memory, emotion, and smell will fuse. Hence why smells conjure memories with such startling vividness: the bright, acrid hit of chlorine undercut with stale sweat that situates you unmistakably back in your high school swim team’s locker room; the downy mix of rosewater, burnt toast, and cigarettes that evokes your grandma’s love.

What does a laser beam or a unicorn smell like ?
We get to invent that.

Among the few who smell the sweet smell of victory in VR smells is Aaron Wisniewski, CEO and founder of the olfactory VR manufacturer OVR Technology. Wisniewski draws a timely parallel: “Covid anosmics often say ‘I’m anxious. I’m depressed. I feel like everything’s in black and white and I feel really disconnected to everyone and everything.’ Wow, that sounds a lot like what people experience who spend a lot of time online.” He continues: “Unless we engineer our sense of smell into digital worlds that we are increasingly in, we’re going to suffer a lot of negative consequences psychologically and socially.” OVR Technology aims to close this sensory gap. Its flagship product, the ION, is a snap-in, refillable cartridge with nine chemical compounds that can be mixed into hundreds of different scents and released to the user’s nose via Bluetooth cues. According to Wisniewski, our current VR, with its lopsided emphasis on sight and sound, is “essentially engineering the humanity out of our lives.”