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Computer scientists add smell to games
From: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol ... 162217.ece
Using scent delivery systems like Biopac could help train military as players can experience odours of the battlefield
by Matthew Bingham

Professor Bob Stone loves the smell of napalm in the morning. He’s less keen on raw sewage, burning vegetation and diesel exhaust, but at the click of a mouse any and all can be wafting through his office at Birmingham University. It’s just one of the techniques the computer scientist is using to make video games more realistic. Stone is helping to develop technology likely to end up in home games consoles to create realistic “smell effects”. Players will experience the odours of, say, the racetrack or the battlefield. His research also has a more immediate goal: to train future recruits to the British military.

Stone, a member of the university’s school of engineering, is being part-funded by the Ministry of Defence to build, as he puts it, “serious” games. He and his team have developed software that can teach submariners to operate rescue craft; soldiers to identify improvised explosive devices; and sailors to fire a deck-mounted minigun.

All have been designed using software development kits made available by games designers. These kits, which are spin-offs from top-selling games such as Far Cry and Half Life, handle the tricky movement and physics of a virtual world, leaving Stone free to superimpose new game-playing technology that stimulates other senses, especially aural and olfactory.

The SDS — scent delivery system — is one of the add-ons that Stone has adopted to make the training games more realistic. It consists of eight sealed chambers, each of which holds a pot of wax impregnated with a pungent odour. Available at $25 (£17.26) each from Biopac, an American educational supplies company, they range from the likes of gingerbread and April showers to a mix of odours designed to evoke combat. On command from the computer, compressed air is blown over some or several of the chambers to stir up an instant impression of Kandahar. more...