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As well as being jam-packed full of exciting tech and gaming announcements CES can also be, well, a bit on the weird side. Sometimes you feel as though companies are just trying to stand out above all the noise with outlandish concept ideas that will never come to fruition.
This year, step forward Sony, which is pushing its “future immersive entertainment” concept that if it ever comes true (spoiler, it won’t) will allow gamers to experience the games like never before.
The concept revolves around a two-minute long video showing a set being constructed and covered in Sony display panels showing footage from The Last of Us game, as players get to experience the game like never before with “engaging audio, haptics, scent, and atmospherics.”
I don’t want to be a post-Christmas Grinch, but this is an industry that continues to lay off developers left, right, and center for profit, and while Sony may, and indeed is, positioning itself as the company ideally placed with all its technology to pull something like this off, at the moment we can’t even get a decent triple-A game close to a VR headset like the Quest 3.
The idea suggests that we will get gaming immersion when we don’t need a VR headset. Fine, but we also don’t all own a warehouse to set this up like a movie production.
So what is the point of it all? Will we eventually be able to smell the cordite from our gunfire and get our own waft of putrid zombie flesh assaulting our senses? Who knows? There’s bound to be some sort of Star Trek Holodeck-type thing at some point in the future but it’s unlikely to arrive much within the next 75 years if not longer*.
As for smell-o-vision, I have a copy of the Infocom Adventure ‘Leather Goddesses of Phobos” on my wall which came with a revolting scratch and sniff card way back in the 80s. Smelling your entertainment has been around since the 1960s when scratch-and-sniff stickers were invented, and as yet I am still not inhaling my games on any kind of regular basis – although I know it was a thing with the Steam Deck for a while.
*a complete guess
