Virtual Olfactory

There’s a lot of chatter these days about the inevitable addition of scent to enhance the video gaming experience, but how about a video game in which the sense of smell plays such an integral role that it can’t accurately be called a “video” game at all?

Does It Make Sense To Have Fun?, one of sixteen juried selections on exhibit at this week’s International Symposium on Electronic Art in Singapore (ISEA 2008), features a video game called Smell Me, in which players have to navigate their way around a virtual environment relying solely on their sense of smell. Sniffing becomes an essential element rather than merely a novel addition, as players are obliged to remember certain scents in order to accomplish certain tasks and to interact with the game and with each other.

“Smell is the interface. You will see I use smell as a core feature,” says Macau-based designer Mei Kei Lai. “In the past, I have found a lot of models that just use smell as a reward, for instance, if you see a picture of an apple, you can smell the apple.” This idea lacked dimension for the imaginative artist, who first became intrigued with the incorporation of scent into interactive design during her post graduate studies in London. “I try to use smell as part of the core features, that the game cannot play if there is no smell.”