Mar 29

Sensory Acumen’s Game Skunk Will Help You Smell Your Game In The Future

Posted in: Today's Chili

Sensory Acumens Game Skunk Will Help You Smell Your Game In The FutureWith the graphics in modern games being so realistic, and with a decent audio setup, you might almost feel like you’re “there”, but what are the other ways that one might go about trying to make the gaming experience more immersive? Well according to the folks at Kotaku, they stumbled upon a device at GDC 2013 made by Sensory Acumen. So what does this device do? Dubbed the rather odd and foreboding “Game Skunk”, what this device does is release smells, presumably related to the game that you are playing.

We can imagine that smells such as sewerage waste could be released when playing games that take the player to a sewer, or maybe the smell of alcohol when walking into a bar, or maybe even cooking smells when playing games like Cooking Mama. It’s an intriguing idea although we’re not sure if gamers will appreciate their homes smelling like the sewers. Apart from gaming, it seems that Sensory Acumen is also looking to use this device for therapy purposes, such as for soldiers sufferiong from post-traumatic stress disorder.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Battlefield 4 DLC Teased, GameStop: Nintendo Wii U Sales ‘Disappointing’,

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Jan 11

Sensory Acumen’s Game Skunk Is Part Video Game Enhancer, Part Therapy Tool

Posted in: Today's Chili

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Eureka Park played home to a whole host of interesting companies and projects (some of which were arguably more interesting than the stuff you’d find on the actual CES show floor) and our first stop was clearly a winner. Meet California-based Sensory Acumen, the creators of curious a scent-generating device called the GameSkunk.

Yes, I know, they should probably work on their branding, but the name does a decent job of explaining what the gadget does. In short, the Game Skunk is a small black box that emits different kinds of odors in an attempt to create a more immersive video gaming experience. It’s not exactly the newest concept out there — the Game Skunk first hit the scene back in 2011, and devices like the ScentScape take a very similar approach to smell-centric media enhancement, but it’s heartening to see the team still plugging away at it.

There’s a much nobler goal here as well — in addition to just enhancing the level of immersion gamers feel as they trek across a digital landscape, the Game Skunk is also meant to be something of a therapeutic tool. By exposing, say, combat veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder to smell-enhanced recreations of war zones, SensoryAcumen hopes to help them cope with the sorts of sensory triggers that make acclimating to life at home so difficult.

Speaking of war zones, that’s exactly the locale that SensoryAcumen took us on an olfactory tour of. While the Game Skunk wasn’t actually running while we were filming (ignore me crouching in front of it like a lunatic), the folks running the booth fired it up just as soon as the camera turned away. It wasn’t long until the device began pumping out a scent highly reminiscent of gasoline as the video demo placed us inside a Humvee rolling through a ruined desert town. Granted, the sketchy CGI quality of the demo made that full immersion unlikely, but Sensory Acumen has made an API and SDK available to game developers who want to bake smell support into their projects.

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