- Guys, guys, guys, guys,
Smell-O-Vision,
it's real and it's awesome.
It's got these vials and they're full of,
some of them are full of smells.
And some of the smells,
some of the smells are good smells.
Some of them,
but, let's just say they don't have to be good smells.
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(device beeps)
(intense techno music)
This my friends is the Cilia Developer Kit from Haptic Sol,
a tool for integrating scent into your VR application
or really any other content experience you can think of.
It's very developer kitty,
so my expectations weren't too high
when we requested this thing,
but we're filming this out of order
and I have already tried it and it does work.
First though, the how.
Inside this box, we've got
nothing but the Cilia device itself,
some spare pods for your oils,
a USB cable and a power adapter.
Now the Cilia a device itself
is just a 3D printed chassis,
housing six individual scents
with their little partitions here
and six individual fans, see that?
Cool, right?
Now you might think that these permeable membranes
on the scents would be enough
to have your whole room smell just from having them nearby.
And there is some smell,
but it's pretty minimal.
That is until the software tells the fan
to kick in and blow it at you.
If you're sitting at your computer,
you would just pop it onto your desk
and have it blow up at you.
You can actually see, it's kind of angled that way.
For a standing experience though,
I'd recommend using the 1/4 20 mount on the bottom
and something like a light stand like this
so that it's closer to your face holes.
If we remove this magnetic panel on the front here,
there's a single PCB running all along the back
that handles power for the fans,
as well as for the RGB, LED.
Oh, my God, it has RGB?
- [Colin] Yeah, rainbow! - It's for VR.
It's for VR, you can't even see it.
You know what, it doesn't matter.
The clear acrylic diffusers
that are up above here are normally transparent
but they're laser etched to help diffuse the RGB light
which is a nice little touch
if you're into that sort of thing.
And the same goes for the custom LTT front panel
that the developer actually sent over for us.
The kit also comes with a full guide on
how to get started integrating into either Unity
or Unreal Engine as well as some introductory info
on the cilia itself.
The software lets you both set your LED colors
and manage your scent profiles for different games.
You can actually even make groups of multiple Cilias
and have a full surround olfactory setup
with up to 255 of them,
if that was something that you would want.
For developers there's the ability to run virtual versions
of the device as well,
allowing you to theoretically include
supporting your game without ever owning one.
And I've been informed that it's also just a nice to have
when you spend your whole day working on a review this thing
and you just need a break from the sensory overload.
Duly noted Colin, thank you.
So the Cilia project is the brain child of Peter Sassaman.
He's built a variety of Haptic devices
over the years like gloves,
but the Cilia is the first device
that he's made publicly available.
The first prototypes were actually pretty close
to the final dev kit that we have right here
only they use little pod air fresheners
instead of these essential oil vials.
Currently there are only two games
that are up and running using the silly SDK,
Adventure Climb VR and there's also a Minecraft Forge mod
which my lovely assistant has loaded up
on this little setup right here.
As far as I've been told it's working, right?
- [Colin] Yep. Should be. - Should I-?
(laughs)
Excellent.
Okay.
Let's good give it a shot I guess.
- [Colin] So, pop out of the control panel,
'cause one thing can use the SDK at a time.
Pa dup, pa dup.
- Oh, wait, no, I wanna adjust my RGB first.
Can I have more RGB?
- [Colin] I'll allow it.
- Oh yeah.
And then I want some, oh God,
I don't know RGB color mixing.
How do I get orange?
- [Colin] It's basic color science, Linus.
- Yeah, are not working.
- [Colin] Your kids probably know this.
- That seems RGB in that fan?
You know, what's kinda cool is the RGB serves
at least some sort of function.
Like it makes it easier to see
your liquid level functional RGB.
That's bound to be a first time for everything.
Okay, Adventure Climb to start.
I swear, it's gotta be working,
'cause I kind of feel like I'm outdoors.
Like is this supposed to be an outdoor smell?
- [Colin] Not yet.
So once you hit the beginning level it will start.
- I could've sworn I smelled something.
Oh my God, I don't have long enough arms
to play this game.
(Colin laughs)
- [Colin] So as you get close to the water
you should get the waterfall scent.
- Okay.
Oh my God.
I can totally smell the water.
Oh God,
oh, oh,
oh, it smells like failure.
(Colin laughs)
Oh, that's extremely disoriented.
(Colin laughs)
It is way more subtle than I expected.
- [Colin] It's pretty subtle in this game.
- Oh, you say that as though it will be
less subtle in other experiences.
- [Colin] But it's a little more binary
than in the Minecraft plugin.
- Got it.
I can totally smell the water.
Now I think we've probably cheated it a little bit here,
carefully making sure that the scent was coming
from the direction of the waterfall,
but it really does,
it really does.
(inhales)
That's,
it doesn't smell exactly like water
but it's close enough that your imagination
can fill in the gaps.
Now my understanding is that it can actually mix sense
if you find combinations that you like.
- [Colin] Yeah, so there can be like items or areas.
So if you're standing in an area
and then say a coffee gets thrown at you,
you can mix the two scents together
'cause they're all individually triggered.
- And what's really cool is that,
normally the way video games enter your senses
is inherently unnatural.
Like a display is never going to look like the real world.
But because it wafts over a real air to you
like, just like in the real world,
I'll get kind of like whiffs of the waterfall scent
instead of it just being constant, you know?
- [Colin] Yep.
- Yooh! I'm gonna hit a wall.
- [Colin] And there you are. - Boo!
- [Colin] Okay, well, that's your first experience.
- Do we have like a pine scent or is that maybe mint?
- [Colin] We have pine and mint,
(inhales)
Victory scent.
- This better than I expected.
(Colin laughs)
This is my first time trying it.
Colin has been the one to be like,
"Are we covering this or not?"
'Cause I was skeptical.
I was also expecting just having these aroma vials nearby
would be distracting at all times.
But,
(inhales)
from here, you can smell it, it's not bad.
- [Colin] So like I had that sitting
on my desk while I wrote this
and after eight hours it's a bit much,
but when you're standing and playing in VR,
you can't smell it.
- As I alluded to before, you're not limited
to VR experiences though.
So let's go ahead and adjust our stand here
and we're gonna play some Minecraft.
- [Colin] So depending on where you are,
like your biome will change or sent to you smell.
If you can find a swamp or a desert.
- Okay, sure.
- [Colin] So you're in forest right now I believe
which should be- - Yep smells fresh.
- [Colin] Rocky plant, aka pine.
If you get to like another or the end,
you'll get cappuccino.
- Okay.
- [Colin] Yeah, and like plants or extreme hills,
you've get fresh air.
- Oh, really?
- [Colin] Yeah.
- Okay, well, let's head down to the water first, right?
I don't think there's any water smell being mixed in
or at least there wasn't.
This is way less realistic
and subtle feeling than the Climb.
I think part of that is just a function
of them kind of going full blow
depending on what kind of area you're in.
And also VR is just more immersive,
but as a whole this is far more experience changing
than I expected.
And like I love technology and everything
and I'm all about advancements, but I was just,
I was a little like, "Eh, do we really need this?"
But now I'm looking at it going like,
it is a matter of time until Gwyneth Paltrow's goop company
releases, certain kinds of sense here
and all kinds of experiences are totally different
than ever before and far more immersive.
What? It's a matter of time and you know it.
(Colin laughs)
- [Colin] Head over the jungle over there
and see the misty section over on your left.
(soft upbeat music)
There you go.
See you went from green to blue.
- Oh, interesting.
You've got different RGB profiles
for the different biome profiles.
- [Colin] Yes.
- That's pretty cool.
- [Colin] Yeah, so I'm not positive that's actually gonna be
any mixing in here.
So you're right on the line of switching between the two.
So if you went back you'll see it switch from green to blue.
- Hello?
There it is.
- [Colin] There you go, yeah.
- And I can definitely smell it,
like immediately I can smell the water smell.
So that's a little immersion breaking
because normally, that kind of water smell,
I would associate more with a waterfall.
Like what we experienced in the climb here,
like, just jumping into a puddle.
You don't get water smell.
Can I get the cappuccino in a Minecraft somehow?
- [Colin] There's a coffee mug and the unreal dembow.
Okay, I'll help do that one.
So this we're going to see real combinations of smells.
So as you run around and get closer to things,
you'll see different smells.
If you get to the end, there's a coffee mug, you'll see it.
- Okay.
- [Colin] Yeah.
- It smells like adventure.
- No, I'm serious.
(Colin laughs)
It's like-
- [Colin] Like what do you think, Indiana Jones or?
- Like you are walking into a new place
and it's just like, "Hoh!"
- [Colin] Don't fall on that.
- Don't fall in there.
- [Colin] Definitely don't do that.
- Does he smell like fight or something?
- [Colin] No he's faulted them up, I've done it a bunch.
- Okay.
(soft upbeat music)
Hot coffee mod.
(Colin snarls)
There is a bit of a delay.
I think part of it is just how far away it is from me.
I think I would have that a little bit closer,
like on my desk if I was really gaming with this thing.
But I that kind of smells like coffee.
- [Colin] Yeah, and so I talked to Peter about this
and he's gonna make some changes.
I think that we can increase the velocity
of the air that's coming out.
So it should hit you a little bit sooner.
And then you could also perhaps have like a zone
where it primes, like it starts spinning the fan
and then pranks the fan.
So there's work to be done
but the idea is that, this is a building block,
it's a dev kit.
- Yeah.
Another thing that needs a lot of improvement
is of course the smell of repository
that you can draw from.
Like our local candle and soap store,
obviously only have things that smell nice
and candles and soap.
They don't have like blood smell
but that might be something that you would want
for a for a gaming experience.
It's amazing how immersive
and effective the coffee smell is.
So having the right sense is key.
Yeah, definitely needs a little bit lower latency.
It's like, it's funny to be talking
about like latency and like smell resolution too,
is something that could be improved, especially in VR.
'Cause I could tell it was coming from the waterfall
and that's something that you'd almost need
like a motorized room to blow smells at you
from the right directions for,
but give it another 10 years,
I'm sure it'll exist.
- [Colin] Yeah, like some of the other scents they have,
are like gunpowder, leather, race fuel, Oak Moss,
riding mower, lawnmower VR.
That's gotta be a thing.
- It's a little rough around the edges
and I wouldn't tell every consumer go
and spend $200 on this as it is today.
But what Cilia taught me for sure is that,
there is something here.
So where does that leave us?
Well, Cilia is isn't the first time to be tossed
into the proverbial ring
when it comes to adding scent to games.
Of the handful of notable examples,
we'd be remiss to forget how back in 2016,
Ubisoft created the Nosulus Rift.
We actually covered this on The WAN Show way back then.
And it was essentially a marketing gimmick
for the South Park game that year
which dumped fart smells directly into your nose holes.
Hilarious, but it was never meant to be a product
that you could actually buy.
On the less technical side of things,
there was also a scented candle released
for Resident Evil IV, which featured the smells
of timber, leather, and blood.
You?
(inhales)
But immersive.
The problem here is that those two implementations
are either enterprise level built just to sell a game
or a pure gimmick, again to sell a game.
Now there are some other commercial options available
notably OVR Technologies ion and the Aroma Shooter.
As far as we can tell though
they're in a similar developmental stage
to the Cilia with an SDK for the major game engines.
But the downside is that they don't have a listing
where you can just buy the device.
You need to email back and forth with the developer
justify your need to help protect their IP, I guess,
which makes sense.
Then get a quote for whatever they decide to charge you.
As far as we can tell, both of those systems
use cartridges that aren't cheap to reload,
unlike the Cilia where you can literally
use any scent that you can find on the shelf.
We actually had one of our little vials spill
in shipping and break through the plastic bag
that it was double wrapped in.
So we visited that local soap company
that I alluded to before and bought a little vial
of pine essential oils for like $3.
That's a feature that I think is, a, consumer friendly
and b, pretty critical in a dev kid.
A little side to that, during the research for this video
we found a Kickstarter campaign
for a device called Feelreal.
Which is a scent curtain that mounts directly
onto your VR headset.
That looked pretty promising initially.
But now it seems to be mired in legal issues
in the U S due to the FDA banning
flavored cartridge based vaping products.
So I guess they're stuck as vapor ware.
- [Colin] Eh! - Eh! That's terrible joke.
Good job.
Anyway, that makes the Cilia as far as we can tell
the only scent based device that you can actually go buy
right now, no strings attached.
There aren't a lot of supported games from the get-go,
but the fact that this is reasonably affordable
and comes with the software building blocks
for you to integrate into your own mods games
or other experiences, is pretty promising.
Does it really matter after all?
I mean, we had this in the script,
but honestly, yeah, it's cool.
I don't, have to hedge my bets on this.
It's cool.
It's really cool.
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Thanks for watching guys.
If you wanna get hands on with the Cilia,
we're gonna have that link down
in the video description below.
And if you want to check out
some other weird VR gear adventures,
maybe check out our video about the VR chair
that took three days to set up
or oh, the fan, the gaming fan.
- [Colin] Yeah, that one was a game or fan or something?
- It's a gaming fan.