Imagine going to a movie and experiencing it with almost all of your senses. That’s the idea behind Positron’s Voyager Motion chairs.
“360-degree rotation as well as pitch, tilt back and forth. It also has haptic feedback, spatial track 3D audio, and now we just started integrating scents,” said Positron CEO Jeffrey Travis.
They’re now playing in virtual reality theaters in five cities, part of a growing number of technologies to make virtual reality cool enough for non-gamers.
There are virtual reality shoes. Contraptions make it feel like you’re flying. Seats that put you behind the wheel of a racecar. Virtual reality body suits that give live haptic feedback.
For gamers playing at home, there’s the Behaptic vest. It has sensors on the arms.
The vests vibrate and pulse to make it feel like you’re being hit, or when you’re shooting a gun.
To smell things in virtual reality on home VR headsets there’s OVR. At a campsite, I smelled not only the fire but the marshmallow I was roasting.
“At arm’s length you might not smell it at all. As you bring it to your nose, the smell starts to trigger here and gets more and more intense as you bring it closer to your nose,” said OVR Technologies CEO Aaron Wisniewski.
It felt, or smelled, incredibly real. While taste may be difficult, tech companies are successfully triggering the other six senses.
“By bringing in scent and adding that immersion and that depth and that emotion into it, instead of being a spectator in the digital world, you become the main character,” Wisniewski said.
Why is this important to non-gamers? Imagine using all of these technologies to take a quick trip for a relaxing day at the beach. Or, virtually visiting Italy, walking down the street to smell fresh pizza. The technologies are here and they’ll be widely available sooner than you think.
