If you’re old enough to remember the actors Peter Lorre and Elizabeth Taylor, there’s a chance you caught their 1960 feature film called Scent of Mystery. It was the first and only Hollywood movie to employ Smell-O-Vision technology. Scents like pipe tobacco, roses and gunpowder were pumped into the movie theatre by a clunky machine that used pressured air.

The film and the technology were both flops. In fact, they were so bad that Time magazine included Smell-O-Vision on a list of the Top 100 Worst Ideas of All Time. A 2016 Indiegogo campaign that tried to bring it back as an art project raised a little over $3,000 from 40 backers.

But technology moves on, and several companies are now developing olfactory add-ons for consumer virtual reality (VR) headsets. A recent press release from the Institute of Science in Tokyo describes a device that “allows a user to experience multiple scents while exploring virtual environments.” According to lead researcher, Takamichi Nakamoto, it can blend up to eight different fragrance components, “so a user can experience scents that match the virtual environments as they explore.” Presumably, if you are virtually strolling through a tranquil part of New York’s Central Park, and the VR suddenly shows a decomposing bear carcass, the scent can be adjusted accordingly.

That grisly scenario reminds me of my first encounter with smell tech. In the early 1980s, I went to the posh Madison Avenue headquarters of Charles of the Ritz to interview the executive in charge of their Aromance Aroma Disk Player. Looking like a CD player, it accepted little round scent discs and filled your home with aromas like “Romance,” “Fireplace,” and “Movie Time,” which smelled like buttered popcorn.

Something possessed me to ask this elegantly dressed woman if it could do other scents, for example, the odour of a wet dog. As I reported in my 2014 book Technocreep, “A pert wiggle of Ms. Charles-of-the-Ritz’s shoulders told me this was the logical end of the interview.” That device survives only as a collector’s item on eBay and Etsy.

The sense of smell is particularly powerful for good scientific reasons. Unlike visual or auditory input, which go through the thalamus, odours take a direct route into the limbic system, hitting the amygdala, which handles emotions, and the hippocampus, which processes memory. This neurological shortcut is the basis for the famous Proustian Phenomenon. It’s named after the fictional passage in which the narrator dips a madeleine cake into a cup of tea and is instantly transported back to his childhood in the village of Combray, in a very visceral and immersive way. Rudyard Kipling also understood this, writing “Smells are surer than sounds or sights/To make your heart-strings crack.” 

Assuming the Tokyo product, or something like it, catches on, it may open a whole new sensory world for men, especially in entertainment. A landmark 2010 study at Florida State University involved men sniffing T-shirts worn by women close to ovulation, by women far from ovulation, and unworn shirts. The result? “Men exposed to the scent of an ovulating woman subsequently displayed higher levels of testosterone than did men exposed to the scent of a nonovulating woman or a control scent.”

On the flip side, 2015 research by Arnaud Wisman of the University of Kent and colleagues exposed people to the “smell of death.” Volunteers, who were compensated, were asked to sniff vials of ammonia, a scentless control substance, and putrescine, which the authors describe as “a volatile diamine that results from the breakdown of fatty acids in the putrefying tissue of dead bodies.” Even below the threshold of awareness, putrescine triggered vigilance and escape behaviours as well as hostility in the subjects. The authors claim “the results are the first to indicate that humans can process putrescine as a warning signal that mobilizes protective responses to deal with relevant threats.”

It won’t take long for the entertainment business to monetize smell tech in many genres.

The porn industry is one of the most consistent and aggressive adopters of new technologies. Adult content has driven demand for higher Internet bandwidth, secure online payment systems, and increasingly, virtual and augmented reality.

The horror film sector accounts for a significant percentage of films made, and based on low production costs, is among the most profitable.

True crime stories now dominate the documentary category on Netflix. According to an October 2025 study published by Digital I, “15 of the top 20 documentary titles (ranked by reach) were true crime docs in 2024, compared to just six titles in 2020.”

A decade ago, when I wrote Technocreep, I predicted that smell tech would gain in commercial importance. Looking forward now, I can envision “smell addicts” who spend all day connected to their VR. Yet, I also envision great uses, such as letting a dying person revisit the smells of their childhood home. Let’s hope the good outweighs the grisly.

Tom Keenan is an award‑winning journalist, public speaker, professor in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape at the University of Calgary, and author of Technocreep: The Surrender of Privacy and the Capitalization of Intimacy.