On June 19, Aromajoin held the pitch event of “Hackaroma,” the world’s first digital scent hackathon. Participants who joined over Zoom each had one Aroma Shooter® — Aromajoin’s digital scent device — and a predefined set of aroma cartridges. Before each presentation, every participant loaded the same designated cartridges into their Aroma Shooter®. When a presenter ran their app during the demo, the same scent was released from every participant’s Aroma Shooter® at once. In this way, the Hackaroma finalists achieved the world’s first remote scent communication.
The six finalists came from four countries: three live in Japan, one in Australia, one in Sweden, and one in Colombia. The multiplayer online game “AromaDraw” won the grand prize. In “AromaDraw,” an AI evaluates a drawing made by one player, and depending on the result, the same scent set is released from every player’s Aroma Shooter®. The other players — who don’t see the drawing — smell the scent and guess what was drawn, with points calculated from everyone’s answers. Other ideas included instant scent-based switching between focus and break modes, controlling scent release with hand gestures, an augmented-reality scent-based matching game, a more immersive dining experience, and a scent-enhanced RPG.
Featured demos
See you at Hackaroma 2021!