This is the story about where we found our motivation to create a new VR Scent solution:
It was 8 years ago when we started this trip… Our dream was to incorporate scents and the sense of the smell, to audiovisual experiences… The idea raised when Raúl Porcar, our founder and CEO, when he was watching a very famous TV Show in Spain called “El Hormiguero” at home and suddenly something exploted… An strange smell spread over the studio and the presenter said:”How I wish you could smell at your home like we do…”.
On those days (year 2011), 3D had been relaunched and you could watch movies in 3D at some theaters, which were required to adapt their theaters to provide this facilities to screen 3D movies…
Thus our CEO asked himself… “Why are other senses highly stimulated and the smell does not?”… That caused that Raúl Porcar identified an opportunity: to create a new system to incorporate the smells into audiovisual experiences…
As many other entrepreneurs when starting a new venture, the first thing is analysing “what is already available in the market”… In these days our founder discovered ancient systems such Smell-O-Vision, Aromarama or iSmell… but nothing that “you can buy” then and start enjoying movies with scents, either on a theater or at your own home…
Whilst we were developing Olorama Technology, a new and disruptive solution to solve the problem (we had our first commercial version in 2014), we never stopped to track which other “mad teams” in the world were doing similar things… And just this year started to ring FeelReal…
2014 – Feelreal:
This guys, based in SF planned to develop a new mask for VR headsets which incorporates 7 different smells and, furthermore, provide other effects (air and heat…). Their first crowdfunding campaign wasn’t succesful (they hadn’t enough backers), but in 2019 they finally succeed on kickstarter and indiegogo and obtained around 300k USD…
FeelReal guys have had problems with the FDA in USA… Seems that US regulators considered that the smells provided by FeelReal must be classified under the same category as Vaping Devices (electronic cigarrettes)…
MultisensAfter several months seems that finally they convinced to the FDA and the startup promised to release the backed units, but now the covid-19 again has delayed the process and the backers are still waiting their units… We wish the best of luck to FeelReal as we don’t see them as competitors but as other “smell lovers” and truly believers of multisensory VR experiences as we are…
2009 – 4DX
4Dx team has an installation in the city where we live (Valencia, Spain)… Seems that these guys have over 600 installations worldwide, and basically what they provide is a special seat for theaters which integrates motion (that’s the main strength of their system), mist and kind of “punchs” you can feel on your back on fighting scenes… Despite that in the marketing material they announce “Smells”, today in Spain you can’t enjoy of them… That makes us think on smells is something they abanboned or simply they only provide smells on specific countries…
Each 4Dx systems costs not less than 30.000€ per theater, and moreover there is a limit on available seats (less than 100 seats…).
CONCLUSION
We’re glad to see that we were one of the few companies which truly believe on scents can drastically enhance the user experience, and day after day we see other teams worldwide that believe the same thing, which doubtless will make that the interest of the users grow… Congrats FeelReal and 4Dx and keep going…!
