Digital scent technology aims to enhance virtual reality experiences by stimulating the sense of smell. Pioneers in the field digitized smells from their chemical profiles and developed hardware like scent synthesizers and cartridges to emit scents from a computer. Potential applications include marketing products with scented webpages, entertainment like scented video games, and education by pairing smells with multimedia. However, the high costs and challenges of reproducing complex smells limit the technology currently to niche uses.