first game the GPU, then PhysX, 3D, and ray tracing. Now it seems that certain smells triggered within a game will be the next step in the evolution of games.

Imagine walking down a narrow street, assault rifle in hand, wading through a sea of Middle Eastern locals and follow soldiers. Various vendors have taken shop along both sides, squeezing in the already gritty, compacted traffic. You look around at the strange new world, admiring the culture, the architecture, the way people brush past your shoulder. You know the place is hot, generated by the moving crowd and the overall desert atmosphere, but you can't feel the heat. People slam your shoulder while darting through the crowd, but you can't feel the pain. But as you move deeper into the bowels of the market, your stomach turns upside down. You feel sick. The strange new aromas--a mixture of food, perspiration, smoke, and other market goods--overwhelm you sense of smell. You want to puke.

Thank goodness it's just a game.

That's the response researchers are trying to trigger through a new experimental game aimed to prep soldiers for active duty. Professor Bob Stone of Birmingham University, who leads a team of scientists that program and test software for various governments, believes that smell is the most "information-rich" sense next to vision. Thus, soldiers entering the scenario above aren't prepared for unfamiliar and pungent smells in real-life situations, thus are taken aback.

The three-year development project, led by former Navy sailor and PhD student Mark Blyth, one of Professor Stone's team members, so far sounds like a trial and error project. The idea is to incorporate certain smells into the game, haul in soldiers that served over in Iraq or Afghanistan, and let them determine if the smell is genuine or not. Blyth is only into the first year of the project, and currently uses local student "guinea pigs" to test the smell situations. However, once completed, the game would ultimately serve as a training tool.

The game works by incorporating aromas provided by an American company that "impregnates" jars of paraffin wax with the particular smell--body odor, burning rubber, burning electrical, feces--needed for the scenario. These jars of "stink" are placed into a box with a fan that is controlled by a computer; the fans turn on when the "player" activates a trigger within the scene. A good example of this would be used in the marketplace scenario described above, or a scenario where virtual soldiers must investigate an area littered with the dead.

But even if the "gamer" could smell foreign food or rotting flesh, would the simulation better help prepare them for the real thing? “What we are trying to discover is if smell enhances a person’s perception--is it better if we add in the scent or not," Blith told Soldier Magazine. “It’s a way of capturing feelings. Sometimes people have a sense that something is wrong, but we have to find out how they know that. Is it smell? Is it someone running through the marketplace? Is it the silence? If smell is one of the main factors then there is a lot of scope for this to be used to help train soldiers’ noses.”

Outside soldier preparation, the team has also developed a demo for testing soldiers suffering with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Defense psychologists, interested in the team's game of smell, originally approached Professor Stone with the idea of using the game as a tool to identify PTSD trigger points. The current demo, containing five different scenes, leads the soldier through a virtual town full of sights, sounds, and smells. The idea is to determine what triggers the disorder through various scenarios: perhaps a crowded scene makes the soldier anxious, the look of a certain individual, the sniper hanging out on the roof, or a particular smell.

“Psychologists can talk people through their problems, but with this technology it is possible to actually program a scene – making it much more relevant to that person’s experience," said the Professor. “We would never be able to make a game that is totally generic because everyone’s experience will be different.”

At this point, it doesn't seem that this new technology will reach the hands of consumers... not anytime soon, at least. Would it even be possible to ad smells to a commercial product? Perhaps a company could manufacture a generic box containing various aromas, connected to the computer via USB and activated by game triggers. But would it act like a wall-outlet air freshener and need refills every other month? If the team proves successful, perhaps game companies will take notice and figure something out.