The Smell of War

The military has long had sophisticated war games for big-picture, Cold Warâ€era strategizing; it possesses
excellent simulators, accurate to the last button and dial, for practicing skills like driving a tank or flying a plane. Teaching ground-level decision-making under stress, however, is relatively uncharted territory, and that´s where the ICT comes in. For the new generation of simulators, the idea is to create virtual environments where trainees can practice tasks such as distinguishing hostile combatants from innocent civilians and calling for fire. The goal isn´t to teach specifics like how to aim a gun, but rather for trainees to practice making choices in an environment that both looks and feels like real war.

Olfaction could be key. A number of researchers believe that smell, more than any other sense, can powerfully and immediately trigger emotions, memories and states of arousal-all of which, when manipulated adeptly, can boost the sense of immersion and thus the quality of training in VR. In short, smellier simulators could produce smarter soldiers. â€We started out thinking that the human was a visual animal only,†says Roger Smith, chief scientist for the Army office charged with procuring new simulation technology. Sophisticated sound systems followed, and now the military is intrigued by the prospect of tapping the power of smell. â€Olfaction is the next step,†Smith says.

The prototype simulation I´m blundering through is called DarkCon; the aroma-emitting device is known as the Scent Collar. Both were the vision of ICT researcher Jacki Morie, revered out-of-the-box thinker and resident crazy aunt. Morie, 56, is a computer artist whose work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; a VR pioneer, she´s been engineering artificial worlds since the late 1980s. Favoring folksy prints and craft-fair jewelry, Morie wouldn´t attract a second glance at the Sunday farmers´ market-you´d never peg her as a military insider. Her expertise with computer graphics and simulation, though, have gotten her work not only with Hollywood visual-effects houses, but also with the Army, Navy and other Pentagon entities. In the mid-1990s, Morie was one of two authors of a proposal that led to the creation of the ICT.

Many of the immersive VR technologies developed at the ICT have been used to instruct thousands of Army recruits at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. â€Everybody who has been to the Middle East says two things about the simulator†at Fort Sill, says George Durham, who oversees its operation. â€One, that it´s really good and realistic. Two, that it´s entirely too clean and there´s no odor with it.â€

Morie watches as I continue my DarkCon demo, charging through open terrain under the sentry´s watchful eye. â€He´s not a very good forward observer,†she says to a colleague. I reach the building and try to figure out where I´m supposed to drop the radio transmitter. Unfortunately, I never get the chance. The sentry
doesn´t fire his machine gun, but he does alert another rebel, who releases a Doberman pinscher. The beast is charging at me now, fangs bared,
saliva trailing. The last thing I smell before the screen goes black is the hot, wet scent of dog breath.

This, then, is the brave new world of olfactory VR-and it looks a lot like 1962. That´s when Hollywood unveiled Sensorama, an immersive, 3-D arcade-game prototype in which participants rode a motorcycle through the streets of New York while fans spread around Big Apple aromas such as the smell of pizza. The sunset of Eisenhower was in fact the heyday of scented media, with the release of the 1959 film Behind the Great Wall in
AromaRama, and 1960´s Scent of Mystery in Smell-O-Vision. Both bombed. â€A beautiful old pine grove in Peking . . . smells rather like a subway restroom on disinfectant day,†Time magazine wrote of Behind the Great Wall. The filmmakers were stymied by technological challenges-securing believable scents, dispersing them at the right times, and changing odors without overlap-that today´s military is working to solve.