00:00It smells like, like a car crash, like burning tires.
00:05PhD student Danelle Jojanova isn't in a vehicle.
00:10She's playing a video game.
00:11The smell she's describing is coming from a scent tube
00:15on the gaming headset she's wearing.
00:17It's a prototype for a novel experiment
00:19at the intersection of gaming and sensory science,
00:23looking at the use of olfactory stimuli
00:25in a virtual racing scenario
00:27and whether it could give users a boost.
00:30Professor Alan Chalmers at the University of Warwick,
00:33which is celebrating its 60th anniversary,
00:36is leading the research.
00:37Gaming, of course,
00:38people want a more immersive gaming experience.
00:41And of course, smell is a very important part
00:42of the real world.
00:43So in the driving simulation that we're doing here,
00:46if you have the smell of the burning brakes,
00:47of course, it's going to indicate there's a problem
00:49and you should maybe take your foot off the brake.
00:50So if you didn't have that smell of burning in the game,
00:53you wouldn't respond correctly.
00:54The headset was designed to release specific odors,
00:57such as machine oil and burning rubber
01:00at critical moments in the game.
01:02But Chalmers acknowledges
01:03those aren't exactly winning smells inside your home.
01:07Smell-o-vision and scratches
01:09have been around for a long time.
01:10But the big problem with any smell
01:11is if you puff smell into an environment,
01:12how do you get rid of it?
01:13So really, the research element
01:14is trying to deliver just the right amount of smell
01:16that you have the immersive experience
01:18without completely smothering the whole environment in it.
01:20The project is a collaboration
01:22with video game developers, Hollywood Gaming.
01:24They're aiming to create the next big thing in gaming,
01:27though the research has applications beyond the game console.
01:33Chalmers and his team have also developed
01:36a prototype device that tests people's sense of taste.
01:39He says it could be used as an early screening tool
01:41for Alzheimer's disease
01:43by measuring how someone's sense of smell and taste
01:47changes over time in, say, a cooking game.
01:50We can check how good you are
01:51compared to your age or sexual ethnicity
01:53or compared to yourself six months ago.
01:55If you're not where you should be,
01:56then you could have a problem
01:57and you should be looked at further.
Comments