This weeks 3 VR stories that caught my eye include a possible silent hill VR game, You can now turn your house into a dungeon crawler and of course Smell your own poo in VR. Lets get into it.

Vermont Tech Start up OVR Technology has created a cartridge that can snap onto your headset just above your nose that is filled with vials of different scents OVR has meticulously  manufactured in their lab. Testers have been able to use the product to pick up a rose in VR and legitimately smell it and then pull the rose away and the scent goes away and doesn’t linger. Which sounds pretty impressive. It’s like a personal version Smell-O-Vision from the 50’s which yes was a real thing hollywood tried to implement in theaters but due to having to make a whole theater smell like something it encountered lots of overlapping smells and problems. Just imagine smelling the penguin in batman… You wouldn’t think it but smell is actually pretty vital to experiences and creating memories just imagine your grandmothers cooking or how thanksgiving dinner has a smell triggered memory. None the less OVR has experimented with more smells than just flowers they have yes worked on urine, garbage, dirt, feces (yum) gunpowder and blood. Luckily these types of scents are more used for training for soldiers or firefighters bc blade and sorcery would definitely be a different type of experience if I had smell the gallons of blood that spills in that game. On the brighter sense of smell this tech can help with meditation apps to add calming scents or add to atmospheric games like Nature Treks VR where you could actually smell the forest or the beach and that’s Escapism at its finest. Currently OVR is only contracted with businesses like clinics for addiction recovery, and they have not divulged the price but I think this is an interesting step into the future of immersion for VR.

You can now turn your whole house into a dungeon, well unless you already have… Using a new app on Sidequest called Dungeon Maker you can create all kinds of midevil traps and obstacles right in your living room. This app makes use of the recent passthrough updates for devs so you can travel through your own home trying not to die. You begin by creating a starting point with your touch controller and then choose a challenging path by adding traps like a giant swinging ax or a pit filled with spikes and add waypoints as a goal for making it through the course. Right now though the traps actually don’t affect you in anyway so you still need to cut off your video game brain a little bit but it is still an interesting experience. The developers field of vision plan to add in more features like spatial anchors, a scoring system, buttons and doors and object collision. If you want to dungeon up your basement you can download the game from Sidequest from the link in the description below

Lastly Konami has updated the trademark for Silent Hill referencing a virtual reality headset, possibly suggesting that if there is a new game in development it could also come to VR which would be absolutely insane. Just imagine playing the infamous PT demo from Kojima on your quest. Oh wait you can, well sorta you can download the hallway as a custom home on sidequest the link of course is in the description. A full fledged silent hill game in VR would be a nightmare and yet a joy all at the same time. So here’s to hoping konami can make something worthwhile in the future. Again this is just a trademark update and internet speculation so I wouldn’t get your VR hopes up just yet.

Thanks for watching and I’ll catch you next week with 3 more VR stories I found interesting. Let me know in the comments what game you’d like to smell. Mine would be Walkabout mini golf Sweetopia level. See ya!!

Getting a new quest? Get $30 free store credit on me by using my referral code: https://www.oculus.com/referrals/link/SlurpeePinata

https://www.wbur.org/news/2022/03/14/virtual-reality-smell-ovr-technology

https://sidequestvr.com/app/7524/dungeon-maker

https://sidequestvr.com/app/6100/pt-hallway-silent-hills
https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/2616537008386430/