Get Ready For Stinky Games: OVR Reveals Omara Game Scent Tech
- OVR unveils Omara, new scent-based tech with 16 in-game smells for deeper immersion.
- Debuts in Akiiwan: Survival, an indie survival game using real field recordings and Indigenous themes.
- Little Buffalo Studios is a Unity for Humanity Grant winner for promoting finding in-game balance over exploitation.
- Omara competes with GameScent, Sony, and Warwick University research.
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Smells Like The Future
OVR is a Vermont-based tech company focused on bringing smells to video games. It’s already partnered with Canadian development team, Little Buffalo Studios, on its upcoming survival-crafting title Akiiwan: Survival.
OVR’s scent tech is called Omara and it works by accessing 16 scents on a cartridge triggered by in-game actions. These could include walking through tall grass, diving into the sea, or practically anything else. As Akiiwan: Survival takes place in the great outdoors, there’s plenty of scope for Omara to bring the outside inside during gameplay.
Jeremy Nelson, Producer for Little Buffalo Studios, said on LinkedIn: “Being able to smell the trees and the campfire and the animals makes you feel like you are really in this world in a way that sight and sound alone cannot do.”
Little Buffalo, Big Ideas
Akiiwan: Survival was one of eight winners of the 2024 Unity for Humanity Grant award, which runs every year and sees indie studios share a $500,000 prize pool, and get technical help to finish their projects. Little Buffalo Studios competed against almost 500 studios to get a share of the Grant from Unity, thanks to the studio’s focus on Indigenous culture and gameplay involving success through balance, not exploiting resources.
Akiiwan: Survival takes place in a vast open world devoid of loading screens, where biomes change with each new moon. There’s a touch of magic realism in the game as the player’s main base and source of information is a talking campfire, which progresses the game lore and player skills each night. Exploration is encouraged without the aid of an in-game map, as it’s possible to fast-travel back to camp at any point from anywhere.
The game also aims to feel deeper and more chill than typical survival games. For example, players can auto-harvest fallen trees and only have to eat once a day. Animals also only attack if they’re seriously antagonized; leave them alone and they’ll leave you alone.
The partnership with OVR should enhance the feeling of being in the wilderness, as besides the scents of nature the Omara tech brings to the game, real field recordings also feature in Akiiwan: Survival.
“The sounds you hear in the game are real!” the studio said on the official game page. “Our lead sound engineer lives in a fly-in community in the North and has been field recording them for years. You will feel like you’re there too!”
Little Buffalo Studios includes devs who have worked for PlayStation, Ubisoft, Netflix and other big names, plus features members of Red River Metis, Anishinaabe, and Mohawk nations. It’s running a series of regular playtests as it invites gamers to help shape development; interested players can find out more about these in the Little Buffalo Studios Discord.
“We’re inspired by the collaborative development stories of projects like SubNautica, where early access and player feedback were crucial in helping to shape the final game,” said Nelson in a press release. “We can’t wait to hear from our community and grow alongside our players throughout this year and into 2026.”
Omara Opens New Sensory Worlds
OVR was founded in 2017 and features leading scent experts and scientists on its team. Its Omara tech can be used with games made in Unity and Unreal Engine via a plugin, with OVR putting a lot of marketing behind the sensory benefit of including smells in games.
“Scent is the new frontier for visual storytelling, and our team of experts in neuroscience, engineering, and design have poured years of research and product development into this breakthrough device,” said Sam Wisniewski, president and co-founder of OVR. “Many studies have shown the powerful connection between scent and our emotions and memories, and it’s time gamers had access to this kind of depth in their favorite gaming experiences.”
OVR lists the 16 scents it can currently provide, and they range from “Winter” (“Notes of cool mint, ozone, and watery melon”) to “Machina” (“industrial parts of cities”), as well as include potential uses in-game, including “warn of danger” and “sense of connection between players.”
For now, Akiiwan: Survival is set to be OVR’s guinea pig and revolve around natural scents – maybe in the future there will be the chance to experience visceral horror games that stink like death, or explore alien planets that smell plain weird.
Smells Like a Bad Idea
OVR admits on its LinkedIn page that it’s not the first company to have the idea of linking smells with games, but it is the first to perfect it. Without actually experiencing Omara it’s impossible to say how true this claim is, but at the same time it’s probably not hard to beat its main competitor (yes, there’s already competition in the field of “game smell”).
GameScent is a consumer device already on the market that retails for around $140. It currently ships with six scents: Gunfire, Explosion, Forest, Clean Air (an odor neutralizer), Storm, and – this is real – Racing Cars. The device is powered by AI and requires linking an app with your console to help the GameScent figure out which smell it should blast into your room.
Customer reviews have so far generally not been kind to GameScent, with plenty of low star ratings on Amazon including gamers unhappy with the smells and set-up.
“The scents are strong and can easily fill the room but most of them don’t smell anything like they’re supposed to, except for storm and forest perhaps. They also have this sickly sweet smell to them that I personally found a little nauseating,” reads one review.
“Setup is complex and hard to understand,” said another dissatisfied gamer. “Played about an hour of games, it fired scents twice, both times were “storm” while I was playing Helldivers 2. No gunfire or explosions triggered.”
“It’s like buying a luxury car that only drives in reverse,” read an especially eloquent three-star review. “The Gamescent’s noble attempt at adding a fragrant layer to my gaming was overshadowed by its more aromatic issues. Its companion app is the device’s saving grace, allowing for a bouquet of six scents that can turn any gaming cave into a luxury spa, minus the tranquility and plus the noise.”
Meanwhile, Sony revealed its Future Immersive Entertainment Concept at CES 2025 back in January, which is a high-tech all-in-one gaming experience that also includes hitting players with smells. Although, it was tested with The Last of Us so that might not have been the most pleasant range of scents.
Warwick University, in the UK, has also been carrying out research into game smells, with its prototype device looking like something MacGuyver might knock up if he played esports and drank too many energy drinks: it pumps essentials oils in front of a fan that then wafts it into a player’s face.
As reported by the BBC, Warwick University is also trying to do what Sony and OVR is doing, by developing smells – and a way to deliver them – that can help bring games to life. The University’s Prof. Alan Chalmers said: “We’re trying to create environments that are as close to reality as we can. People want more immersive experiences.”
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