Smell-o-vision for porn is not, you may be surprised to hear, only about filling the air with the pungent odor of bodily fluids and sweaty balls. There is definitely some of that if you want, but not entirely and not so simply. It can also smell like fresh baked cookies.
CamSoda, an adult entertainment webcam platform and among the first to use virtual reality in cam girls’ work, is developing smell-o-vision custom-picked by their models. Like its recent forays into virtual reality, it’s hard to tell how serious CamSoda is about the technology and how much of it is just a promotional stunt, but smell is a sensation other developers are seriously trying to bring into VR, so it’s worth considering how it might be used with porn.
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If you’re surprised about the food, so were the developers of this technology.
As CamSoda tested out their new device, called OhRoma, they found people are more turned on by the smell of food than they are of sex. “You wouldn’t want the smell of sex 24/7 in your face, even in a real life scenario,” company president Daron Lundeen told me.
CamSoda’s gas mask-like device is comprised of several interchangeable canisters, a heating element, and Bluetooth to connect it to your smartphone. They’re offering 30 scents to start, including “private parts,” “body odor,” “fragrances,” “panties,” “aphrodisiacs,” and “breath.” Viewers can use an app to control the scents’ strength or turn one off altogether. The company is taking pre-orders and hopes to ship by the spring. The mask plus 30 scents costs $99, with additional scent cartridges priced from $5.99 to $9.99.
It’s a boon for the horny masses already willing to strap bulky devices on their faces for the sake of getting off. But OhRoma could also give the women doing the cams more creative control over their work than ever. They can choose what scent profile represents whatever scene they’re doing. A gamer model requested Cheetos, beer, and weed for her room’s scents.
“The models who make the most money are not fucking themselves on camera the entire time,” Lundeen said. They’re hanging out, cooking, having a glass of wine, talking about the news. There’s still a show, rest assured, but it’s not all about watching her have sex. It’s building a relationship, Lundeen said—acting as the always-there girlfriend for a hundred watchers at a time. Anything that can add intimacy to the user’s experience makes for a better show, and a better show means more tips from happy, loyal viewers.
“Scent is something that brings back memories, it just adds depth and color to our work,” Lundeen said. “It makes perfect sense to let a model create that in her own room.”
It all sounds very immersive, if you can forget you’re wearing a VR headset strapped to your face and a gas mask pumping chocolate chip cookie and vagina smells into your nose. The design of the device is OhRoma’s biggest challenge. How do you make a complicated device less of a bulky boner-killer?
As “generation one” of the future of smell-o-vision porn, Lundeen believes the design will lose its girth and get smarter. Like any essential technology in the last decade, it could get more sleek and compact, as a nose clip or some other compact wearable device. It all depends on whether the people demand to smell cake with their cams.
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