Virtual reality video games really can be brought to life with scents designed to match the action, a new study shows.
In experiments, volunteers played virtual reality (VR) game Resident Evil 7 Biohazard, both with and without smells that complemented parts of the game.
Scenes in the survival horror game feature intense smelling objects such as rotten food, smoke and a rotting head.
Researchers found that the addition of the smells significantly increased people’s sense of being present in the game environment.
Screenshot from Resident Evil 7 Biohazard, a virtual reality game featuring featuring intense smelling objects such as rotten food, smoke and a rotting head
In Resident Evil 7 Biohazard, the player controls Ethan Winters from a first-person perspective as he searches a derelict estate for his missing wife
The new study was conducted by researchers at Australia’s government agency CSIRO and the University of Technology Sydney.
‘Virtual reality (VR) headsets provide immersive audio-visual experiences for users, but usually neglect to provide olfactory cues that can provide additional information about our environment in the real world,’ they say in their paper.
‘Overall, the results indicate the addition of odours to a VR environment had a significant effect on both the psychological and physiological experience showing the addition of smell enhanced the VR environment.’
For the study, the researchers recruited 22 subjects who explored the same VR environment of Resident Evil 7.
In all, 13 of the participants had previous experience with VR and only three participants had no experience playing any video games. Only one participant had previously played Resident Evil 7.
As they played, the game was augmented with smells generated by an olfactometer, which delivered odour volatiles via a soft plastic tube fixed underneath a participant’s nose.
Zone 1: participant briefing and post-gameplay questionnaires, Zone 2: the gameplay area, Zone 3: olfactometer, and Zone 4: the monitoring/supervision area.
One volatile was cis-3-hexen-1-ol, an oily liquid that smells like freshly cut grass, to bolster the sense of being in a forest.
Another was dimethyl trisulfide, a decomposition product of bacterial decomposition, including the early stages of human decomposition.
Participants walked through the same VR environment twice, with or without the introduction of odour stimuli.
Directly after each gameplay, participants completed a questionnaire to determine their ‘sense of presence’ (sense of being in a particular place or time period) from the overall gameplay, as well as their sense of immersion in each of the scenes.
Additionally, physiological measurements – heart rate, body temperature and skin electrodermal activity – were collected from half the participants for each gameplay. ‘Electrodermal activity’ refers to changes in the resistance of the skin to a small electrical current based on sweat gland activity.
The results showed the addition of odours significantly increased participants’ sense of spatial presence in the VR environment compared to VR with no odour.
Participants also rated the realism of VR experience with odour higher compared to no odour; however, odour did not result in change in emotional state of participants (arousal, pleasure and dominance).
The survival horror game, which supports the PlayStation VR headset, is the first main Resident Evil game to use a first-person view
Further, the participants’ physiological responses were impacted by the addition of odour.
The team say odours offer an opportunity to ‘create a more immersive experience to increase a person’s presence within a VR environment’.
‘In addition to gaming, the results have broader applications for virtual training environments and virtual reality exposure therapy,’ they write.
The study has been published in the journal PLOS One.
***
Read more at DailyMail.co.uk