I am standing in a room right out of The Matrix, without the sinister aspects of that 1999 science fiction movie.
To my left, I see a hot pizza oven with a raw pie ready to be shoved in. In front of me, a table of ingredients, including basil, garlic and mushrooms. With my white-gloved right hand, I reach out to pick up a mushroom slice, and hold it to my nose. I smell the pungent, earthy aroma before placing the slice on the pizza.
Next, I pluck a bright green basil leaf from the table, and take in the sharp, pleasant fragrance of this ubiquitous herb.
Now, I'm ready to cook. I depress the red button on the table and the pie slides into the oven. Seconds later it comes out with a ding, steaming hot, and I smell the mouth-watering odor of a freshly cooked pizza. I'm getting hungry.
I hear Aaron Wisniewski, CEO and co-founder of OVR Technology, telling me to turn 180 degrees. Behind me, three symbols float in the air. A pizza, a rose and a watermelon. I reach out to touch the rose.
Now I see a bed of red roses. I pluck one from the ground and hold it to my nose, the soil dropping from its root ball. The intoxicating scent of rose. A lawnmower flies by, flinging cut grass into the air, and I smell the odor that takes me back to childhood in Oklahoma.
"The roots have an odor too," I hear Wisniewski say.
I hold the root ball up to my nose and sure enough, the smell of soil.
Next I select the watermelon, and now I have a pile of watermelons in front of me.
"Wait a minute, what's this?" I ask, looking down at my right hand, which holds a gun with a red laser shooting out of the barrel.
"You can shoot the watermelons," Wisniewski replies.
I do, and it's fun as they explode into flying red chunks of melon. And yes, the smell of watermelon fills the air.
Using an Oculus Quest headset, I have experienced virtual reality with the added sense of smell, thanks to the cutting-edge work of this Burlington startup, OVR Technology.
Nine scents, millions of possibilities
The company's patented technology, a clear plastic scent module with nine odors, is attached to the virtual reality headset with a Velcro band, placing the module in position to emit scents on cue.
"We can put any nine scents we want in the cartridge," said Erik Cooper, a co-founder and OCR's chief design officer.
Aaron Wisniewski calls it "scentware," which together with the software that drives it and the hardware that delivers it, brings a whole new level of immersiveness to an already immersive experience. OVR has filed for six patents on its technology and has received two of them.
"Your brain and your body find it very hard to tell the difference between the virtual world and the real world, and by adding the sense of smell you engage the limbic system, which is the part of your brain where memory and emotion lives," Wisniewski said. "You create a much more powerful and lasting impression and memory."
Wisniewski and his brother, Sam, together with three co-founders, started the company in November 2017. The genesis of OVR Technology came, Aaron Wisniewski said, when each of the founders tried virtual reality for the first time.
"We tried it together and independently, and all immediately saw the potential of what virtual reality could accomplish if it was successful," Aaron Wisniewski said. "We also noticed it wasn't there yet. Virtual reality was primarily video games at the time, and is still very heavily video game focused."
Incorporating smell into virtual reality, OVR intends to focus on customers in health care, education and other fields. These customers will use OVR's technology to train emergency medical technicians, or to help war veterans deal with post traumatic stress disorder.
"Virtual reality is a tool really," said co-founder Matt Flego. "It's really good at simulating things you can't really do in real life, or it's expensive to do in real life."
"It's a very valuable tool," Flego said.
This is not your mom's perfume
Flego is OVR's chief technology officer. Aaron Wisniewski is chief executive officer and his brother is chief financial officer and chief operating officer. The other two co-founders are Erik Cooper, chief design officer; and David Stiller, who is the lead investor. Stiller declined to say how much he invested in the company.
Stiller's father is Bob Stiller, who founded Keurig Green Mountain. David Stiller is also chairman of employee-owned Heritage Aviation in South Burlington.
Before OVR Technology, Aaron and Sam Wisniewski founded Alice & The Magician Cocktail Apothecary in Burlington, which produces "elixirs and aromatic mists" to enhance your cocktail drinking experience.
Stiller said he met Aaron Wisniewski through his alma mater, Champlain College, and that the two simultaneously hit on the idea of adding smell to virtual reality.
"I asked him, 'Have you ever thought about combining scent with virtual reality?'" Stiller remembered. "I loved his response: 'I think about it all the time.'"
Stiller said it's important to him and the other co-founders that they use technology to "enrich humanity."
"We want people to go into the virtual reality experience in order to be better in their normal life," he said. "We don't want to suck people out of life into a tech experience."
Aaron Wisniewski is the scent "magician," previously for Alice & The Magician and now for OVR Technology. He says when people think of scents, they think of perfumes or air fresheners, which he classifies as an "inexpensive interpretation" of scent.
"For us, accuracy and authenticity is paramount," Aaron Wisniewski said. "We actually go into the field, and using our expertise and analytical chemistry capture the chemical molecular makeup of smells. Then we're able to recreate those smells identically in our scentware laboratory."
Flego cautions that there are some "caveats."
"There are smells like diesel fumes for instance that we can't pump into your nose willy nilly," Flego said. "So we do take some interpretation when it comes to toxicity and go to great lengths to make the safety factor of the scents very high."
Flego calls Aaron Wisniewski "an incredible olfactory artist."
"Some of the scents we would interpret as poisonous are pretty damn accurate," Flego said.
'We're not anti-fun'
Dozens of dropper bottles line a set of shelves in the OVR Technology office with labels like "feces," "urine" and "cadaver."
"We have had some experiences here," Flego said, a bit cryptically.
But Aaron Wisniewski insists it's critical for some of the company's potential customers to have "malodors" you would go out of your way to avoid.
"For example, some of our early partners are experimenting with virtual reality to manage PTSD for veterans," Aaron Wisniewski said. "So the smell of diesel fuel or garbage or gun smoke or blood (are relevant). Those smell associations are the hardest to work through in behavioral therapy, and if you haven't worked on them you can be walking down the street and a smell can trigger either the memory, or the emotions associated with those memories."
That's what post traumatic stress disorder is, Wisniewski said — elevated states of anxiety, fear and aggression without knowing where they come from.
"The emotion is there from the trauma but the memory of the trauma is locked away," he said. "So by using virtual reality and these odor cues ... doctors and clinicians are in a safe, controlled environment, allowing patients to re-experience and re-process the difficult memory, and kind of re-wire the brain so the triggers are no longer there."
OVR Technology isn't all about blood and feces. The same tools that help train EMTs or help veterans deal with PTSD can also be used as a tool for relaxation, Sam Wisniewski said.
"There is joy and a sense of well-being that can be received from going into an environment different from where you are, and experiencing a beautiful location with the scent of flowers or fresh-cut grass," he said. "It still fits into our mission of providing outcomes."
"We're not anti-fun," Aaron Wisniewski added. "We're not just here to inflict pain and misery on people."
OVR Technology has yet to sign up its first customer, but Aaron Wisniewski said the company will generate revenue in 2020. OVR is a B2B company, and will focus on a subscription model. It will not go after individual consumers. The company's services will start at less than $100 per month, depending on the needs of a client.
OVR's coming out party was in late May at the Augmented World Expo (AWE) in Santa Clara, California, which went virtual because of COVID-19. Aaron Wisniewski had been scheduled as a keynote speaker at the convention.
"We still used the expo as a launch point to announce to the world we exist," he said. "Being a virtual reality company we were naturally pretty good at going virtual. We adjusted quickly."
Contact Dan D’Ambrosio at 660-1841 or ddambrosio@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @DanDambrosioVT. This coverage is only possible with support from our readers. Sign up today for a digital subscription.
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