What’s stopping us from making smellulators, for games or movies?
Vietnamwar videogame: smell of napalm in the morning.
The sims: baby pooped.
Survival game: that lump of flesh is rotting.
Smell you later
Images flash by and disappear. Sounds may resonate a little but are basically gone as soon as you stop making them.
Smells linger.
Imagine the cattleyard smell still hanging in the air when the scene has changed to milady’s boudoir, or to the fancy restaurant.
Too complex, too many inputs needed, it would be a proprietary exploitation product nightmare like liquid ink paper printers, initially bringing such a product to market would make it cost a fortune, and it would need widespread adoption before the economy of scale could kick in.
Technologically, nothing. They’ve even been made before! (Japanese scientists even made a device that would let you taste things!)
The problem is, nobody actually wants to buy them so nobody is making them for people to not buy because that would be a waste of time and money. Knowing that death and sewers are super common in games, I can’t say I would want smell-o-vision myself.
