... All this immersive, world-building magic that smell can supply aligns with what VR wants to offer. These days, VR's chief aim is to help users experience what it feels like to be someone else. It’s “a quest towards embodiment,” says Lisa Messeri, an assistant professor of sociocultural anthropology at Yale who studies VR. “And when we think about what the body is, it’s this compilation of senses, in an incredibly reductive form.” Messeri is quick to caution that “embodiment is so much more than a collection of senses”—conflating embodiment with empathy is a mistake VR storytellers can learn to avoid. However, sensory experiences are still the primary levers that VR can pull to immerse us in their worlds. And right now hardly anyone pulls perhaps the most powerful lever of them all. ...
See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/vr-still-stinks-because-it-doesnt-smell/