Smell. It's often called the "forgotten sense" and when you think about it, you too might be tempted to ignore this all-important sense. After all, your sense of smell doesn't seem nearly as critical as the other senses it's competing with - sight, touch, taste or hearing. Ah, but it's time you reorganized your thinking. This much maligned sense is forging a comeback of sorts...at least in the field of entertainment. At the Consumer Electronics Show held earlier this month in Las Vegas, a Silicon Valley-based company called Scent Sciences introduced its ScentScape® Gaming Suite, a device that allows you to smell the video games you're playing. More on that in a minute. Let's see why this sense is so important that a company would invent such a machine in the first place.

According to Discovery Health, smell is a "chemical sense detected by sensory cells called chemoreceptors." In other words, when your nose detects an aroma, these chemoreceptors get to work and send an electrical impulse to your brain, which "interprets patterns in electrical activity." Specific odors are then identified. This forgotten sense is also linked to those parts of the brain responsible for processing emotion and associative learning. It's complicated but the basic gist is that when you smell and the brain is alerted, the part of your brain that is contacted is connected to your behavior, mood and memory. Because of smell's link to a person's emotional center, studies are being done on one's sense of smell and how it's connected to neuroscience and behavioral science.

Since the sense of smell is often the first response to outside stimuli, like, say, a fire (you'll smell whatever's burning before you'll actually see the flames), it didn't take long before people began trying to attach smell to visual stimuli. Theater owners dating back to the early 1900s tried infusing their theaters with various scents to entice people into their theaters and to make the movie-going experience more enjoyable. Perfume was sprayed from the ceiling of one theater, another owner invested in an in-theater smell system and, in 1938, Walt Disney considered adding scent to the company's 1940 initial release of Fantasia but abandoned the idea due to cost. A year later, Swiss inventor Hans Laube created Scentovision which pumped odors into seats through pipes controlled by the projectionist. Laube introduced his system at the 1939 World's Fair but then his equipment was seized under patent infringement and Laube left America. Film producer Mike Todd, Sr., who had met Laube at the World's Fair, wanted Laube to bring the newly renamed Smell-O-Vision to his big-budget film, Around the World in 80 Days. Ultimately, Todd and his son, Mike Todd, Jr., opted not to use it on this film but did try Laube's improved system (consisting of a motorized belt with perfume containers) on a comedy-mystery they produced called Scent of Mystery. Meanwhile, a competing system called AromaRama (which pumped aromas into theaters via the air-conditioning system) was invented and attached to a travelogue of China called Behind the Great Wall. Both films were rushed out with their smells intact but neither system was a success. Most critics felt these were fruitless and sensationalistic attempts to get people away from their brand new television sets and back into theaters. In fact, a Time magazine reader survey listed Smell-O-Vision as one of the "Top 100 Worst Ideas of All Time"!

Despite these failures to entice people to watch and smell, advertisers and marketers continue to be attracted to the sense of smell. In fact, retail stores - now more than ever - are attempting to use the sense of smell to entice their customers to buy more. Say, for example, you block out the stimuli surrounding you as you walk through a store or boutique and instead focus on the air around you. You might detect the very faint aroma of jasmine or lavender. This is just the shopkeeper's attempt to use smell in a subliminal way; it's supposed to make you more serene. Then, when you're more relaxed, you'll buy more! And, movies haven't stopped trying to incorporate smell, either. In 1982, director John Waters used a modified version of Smell-O-Vision that he called Odorama (consisting of scratch-and-sniff cards) in the release of his film, Polyester. In addition, some version of smell spreading is used in films shown throughout the Disneyland resort parks.

But, this new creation by Scent Science could be the thing that seals the deal and fuses image with scent successfully. ScentScape® Gaming Suite is a digital scent delivery system that provides scent to gaming by "layering scents to enhance immersion and presence with unique delivery hardware, software and services." All you have to do is plug the "Plug-N-Play" unit into any compatible PC or gaming console. Voila! You've got smell! The unit syncs up with the action in the game and provides background scents that enhance your playing experience. If your hero is running through a forest, you'll have the pine forest scent hitting your olfactory senses; same with ocean breezes, flowers or smoke. If you're playing a racing game, your adrenaline will rush as you see, hear and now smell the burning rubber of your tires screaming around a curve. The system provides 20 basic scents per cartridge, with each cartridge lasting 200 hours or more. The price of the unit is still to be determined and there is no definitive release date, although the company says it will be soon.

So, readers, what do you think? Would you like to smell what you're playing? Offer your opinions below.