This product sounds kind of terrible. How is this $150 "AI powered" device any better than simply opening a bottle of scented oil on your desk? Even if it were to reliably release scents according to sounds detected in games, which seems questionable, those scents are going to take a while to reach your nose and will continue to linger in the room for some time thereafter, eventually all mixing together if multiple are used within a game. And do you really want your room to smell like exhaust fumes and burning rubber while playing a racing game, or like smoke and sulfurous chemicals during an FPS game? I don't see that contributing to the experience in any positive way. And if you want your room to smell like a forest or rainstorm or something to match the setting of a game, you could do that by simply picking up a set of essential oils with various smells.
The product description also mentions that "Audio is swiftly processed in the cloud" suggesting this device is uploading your audio to some unknown web service to detect what types of sounds are present. And of course, when that web service inevitably shuts down, your device of questionable usefulness will become a device of no usefulness.
Meanwhile, TechSpot mentions three other examples:
...a VR mask that can support up to 9 of 255 available scents...
What they didn't mention was that the VR mask attachment never became anything more than another Kickstarter scam that brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars from backers between that platform and Indiegogo without ever releasing a product. Checking the campaign pages, crowdfunding launched for the device in April of 2019 with a supposed August 2019 release date, which would have been just 4 months later, implying that the device should have already been entering manufacturing. The release date then got pushed back to the fourth-quarter of the year, followed by an announcement toward the end of that time frame suggesting that the headsets were supposedly ready but were not able to receive FDA approval related to them effectively being vaping devices. Then, a few months later, in March of 2020, they made a post suggesting that the FDA approval issue was supposedly resolved without going into any detail about how, but that now Covid lockdowns were conveniently an issue. Then, another update in November of 2020 suggested that it was on hold due to travel restrictions and that they were waiting for "borders to be open again", despite the devices supposedly being "ready" a year prior, and there have been no updates since, and the product's official website and social media pages are no longer online.
A product along those lines could theoretically perform better though, since releasing scents in small quantities near a person's nose would allow them to change more precisely according to what was happening in a game, though that device also apparently would have required integration with games and videos to work, so it's questionable how much support a niche device like that would ever get. And really, for something like that to work well, you would ideally want more than just a handful of scents to work with at once.
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