Racers, start your engines, and may the best smell, win! Modern video games look and sound more realistic than they ever have. But there's one sense developers have yet to exploit - smell.
Imagine playing as Mario, pirouetting through the Mushroom Kingdom as a waft of a Fire Flower power-up hits you. Or dropping into a hallway in the Last of Us crawling with Clickers - the deadly, stalking enemies mutated by an extinction-level fungal pandemic. James, a member of the Nuneaton Nitros esports team, says he's curious about some of those weird aromas.
But he does admit they're likely to be "pretty grim". Gamers like him are currently being used to answer a question - can smelling a game make it more immersive, and make you better at playing it? That's what researchers demoing experimental tech at Warwick University's Festival of Innovation are hoping to find out.
They've developed a custom-made headset that delivers tiny doses of smell pumped through a tube and dispersed via a fan in front of the player. Developed in conjunction with Hollywood Gaming, it uses bottles of essential oils to replicate a range of different aromas. When we tried it out the the sickly smell of petrol wafted in front of our noses while racing around the track. Hit the brakes, and you're suddenly getting a blast of plasticky rubber.
You also get the faint scent of "new car smell" while you're playing. As anyone who's ever had a wet dog in their house will know, it's not easy to get rid of a smell once it's there. According to the researchers behind the project, the real challenge is quickly switching between scents as a game progresses. That can be especially tricky if you're facing a sudden transition between two contrasting scenes such as a flashback from a post-apocalyptic scene to a pre-doomsday memory.
