AromaVerse

Enhancing your Gaming Experience, One Scent at a Time

Inspiration

The inspiration for AromaVerse came from the desire to create an immersive gaming experience that connects the virtual world with real-world sensory engagement. In the gaming world, we currently only use two of our senses to have an interactive experience; why not add a third- a sense of smell? Our main goal is to bring a unique, multi-sensory layer to Minecraft, using various scents to enhance the player's immersion in different biomes.

What it does

In its essence, AromaVerse detects the biome a player is in and triggers a motor to run through a Raspberry Pi to press down and release a scent. This offers players a sensory experience based on the in-game environment, such as forest, jungle, or flower meadow scents. This gives a realistic and immersive gaming experience for players of all kinds.

How we built it - with love ❤️

We built AromaVerse using the Spigot Server side software hosted on top of Minecraft's server software (Bukkit), which provides an interface for our code that allows us to make a plugin that detects the player's biome. This plugin makes and HTTP request to our built Flask API running on a Raspberry Pi, which controls GPIO pins connected to DC motors that activate scent sprayers.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was constructing a physical case to hold the motors and spray bottles in a way that the motors can repeatedly push down on the bottles. Additionally, we also had to manage the timing and activation of the GPIO pins to avoid continuous scent releases when players remained in the same biome and when they left the biome.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully integrated real-world hardware with a Minecraft plugin to create an interactive experience that adds a whole new layer of immersion. The system responds in real-time to biome changes and releases the correct fragrance, enhancing the player's experience in the game. What's cool is that we've also managed to utilize VR technology to connect it to our HP Reverb g2 VR Headset and create a truly immersive experience- complete with custom-built fragrances for each biome.

What's next for AromaVerse

We plan on adding newer scents, for our prototype we only have three scents that periodically release with a change in specific biomes. We would like to extend this feature to build onto the gaming industry. It also allows us to build servers on top of popular existing games using our concepts and continue to develop our product more efficiently. An example of that would be to develop a design that involves building an atomizer to diffuse our fragrances better. Although we were able to successfully build the prototype and upload it with detailed documentation as an open-source project, including an extensive range of sensory fragrances would definitely add to our project as we are already able to detect biomes.