1y ago

What does dragon breath smell like?

I got my hands on MPEG-V standard documents which lets me inject "SEM" (sensory effect metadata) inside .mp4 files which would let me program real world stuff on cues like lights, chair movements, water sprays, etc. So literally if I had a NAS with a hoard of movies and bought the right equipment, i could make 4DX at home.

There's an effect description named "scent", which would, obviously, spray some aromatizer or something in the room. I checked out the standard list of scents that can be applied. There are scents like rose, lavender, mint, apples, mixed herbs, but i came across an interesting one which is the one i'm asking for.

    

  Scent of dragons breath
  Describes the scent of dragons breath

Maybe this is a weird reason to ask this... I really want to know out of curiosity if this "dragon breath" would be some specific mix of herbs or incense or any kind of room spray. I sense it would kind of be an artificial scent... but idk... really... Would it really work if i coded a "Home 4DX" version of the Hobbit movies?

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Sulphur is what comes to mind.
- This is the real answer. Sulfur Dioxide would basically eliminate any other odors. I'm thinking ozone would be a possible addition, along with whatever that metallic smell is, but nothing biological, no rot, etc.
  
  It’s not the real answer because dragons aren’t real lmfao
- Nice. Even considering that "sulphur" is not an entry on the scent list i got. I guess that could work out
- That's more like demons, though.

Typical description is hot rotten meat. It's not like they have dragon sized toothbrushes.
- Isn't that what the brush on spartan helmets is for?
- Real answer here. It can't be too gross if you want people watching your movie, though.

My guess is dragons breath is produced by a combination of two glands that produce chemicals that are hypergolic. This is seen in nature in bombardier beetles (which use hydroquinone + hydrogen peroxide).
The smell would certainly depend on the combination of chemicals, but a hot burnt and charred smells are probably common to all possibilities. The unburnt chemicals are likely to be irritants, being either strong oxidizers or reducers.
Overall, even after the main blaze has cooled, I would expect the area (and downwind) to be unsafe for humans and respiratory issues for those exposed to the remnants.
- Hey, this is a unironically a very good answer regarding "real" dragons. Although, the cinema scent would hopefully not be an airway irritant.
- Kinda like in Reign of Fire

Without any real technical answer, dragons breath should be sharp, warm, and smokey, but not so much that you think there's a fire in the building. Maybe the smell of slightly burnt, very seasoned meat?
- You could hook it up to a toaster and turn the setting up depending on intensity.

Depends on the color dragon

It actually doesn't really matter which smell you use. The important part is that you install a small, persistent flame in front of the diffuser. That turns any aroma into dragon's breath.

What does dragon breath smell like?
first in the morning when you wake up, blow air out your mouth to your palms, and then go ahead and smell it.
that's what dragon breath smells like.
- Better yet, lick the back of your palm, blow on it to dry, then smell.
  
  hardest upvote I ever had to give

ground dragonfruit

Vinegar, Gasoline and Rotten Meat

Would it really work if i coded a "Home 4DX" version of the Hobbit movies?
Are there ways to obtain and refill this pallete of smells and connect them to a home cinema? I guess it would work if you have the hardware and the juice for it.
I imagine dragon's breath is not unlike a coal furnace, or a chain smoker.
- In a software level, it is easy to time effects like smells in a video file thanks to the information i found. The hard thing is to program the hardware.
  
  You are into assembling and instructing that hardware yourself?

The only dragon's breath I'm aware of are incendiary shotgun rounds.
- You mean rocket launcher?
  
  There is a type of shotgun shell that spits a stream of fire when fired.

Impending death.

Was this added for the shrek 4D movie thing? I saw that in an amusement park once. The dragon sneezes in your face.

Seared kobold flesh and lingering brimstone.
Take a blowtorch to some grisltly game meat and at the same time burn a firecracker (or sparkler or whatever) and you'll get the idea.

Dragon's breath is a pretty common name for incense scents, but it seems to vary a bit between different brands. The only common ingredient I saw was that most of them have musk or "white musk"

That list sounds like the General MIDI of smells to me.
- Exactly. The actual name is "ScentCS"
  
  Do you happen to still have the link to the standard?

Depends on the dragon.

I just went looking for this document and found it for sale here; meanwhile over here there is a helpful PDF with a watermarked line drawing of the CD-ROM they'll sell it to you on.
Fuck ISO so much.
- Website wouldn't even let me view its contents unless I enabled scripts and THEN would roadblock if I didn't accept cookies. No thanks.
- You found it, yay! Except i have an edition from 2019 instead of 2011. Wow this standard is so old yet no one had the idea to implement such thing for home cinema?
  Honestly yea, fuck the paywalls. Though some german user uploaded a full list of standards updated to 2021, including ISO, DIN, IEC, IEEE, ASTM, so many others. They're available for free now. They sometimes include the CD-ROM files, but i don't think the document i got is my case

Well, there are established fictional descriptions, or indications.
The one that I think would hold up the best would be the way Pern (Anne McCaffrey series) handled it. In that series, the dragons weren't your typical fantasy dragons, they had been genetically engineered from a smaller creature called "fire lizards". So there was an attempt to lean harder into sci-fi than fantasy from the beginning of the series, even though it didn't seem like it.
That's kinda tangential, but McCaffrey did put some thought into how they shot fire.
The dragons chewed up phosphorus bearing rocks, swallowed them into a special stomach, and the results of that breaking down allowed them to basically belch flames.
If you're going to ignore "magic" as the source of the breath weapon, then that method makes sense. Since phosphorus sulfide could conceivably be made inside some kind of complicated organ like that, as could other phosphorus based compounds, the obvious choice is for dragon breath to smell like matches.
Now, that assumes you meant what the breath smells like because they breathe fire. There are other versions of dragons that shoot other things. But, more importantly, shooting fire isn't actually the same thing as breath. It's a separate process from breathing.
So if a dragon was in front of you, breathing in and out of its mouth, it wouldn't be ONLY the smell of the fire starting agents. You'd smell the brew of saliva, any leftover bits of food left in the mouth, and likely some degree of "funk" from whatever extra compounds were in the saliva to help it protect the dragon from its own fire.
Imagine a snake's breath, but spicy ;)

how much of Minecraft?

If you get this working, please share the results! It's an awesome idea.

I'd heard that when they breathe fire it's essentially like lighting a fart.

I'd wager it smells like burned nose hair

Well that's very interesting. I'm guessing this is a proprietary scent that got added to the standard by whoever from the industry.
If I was designing it, it would definitely be fire-y. It would be a bad smell if I was being realistic, full of lizard bile sort of smells mixed in with partial combustion products, but nobody wants to be immersed in that. So, I guess the question is what sort of fire is dragon's breath?
It's supposed to be pretty hot, so maybe it's a metal sort of fire, but then again you don't really see that in the natural world. Acetylene and friends could do the same, although I'm not sure what that smells like exactly. Maybe I would split the difference between organic and metallic and go with a burning beeswax/hot metal combo, which shouldn't be too gross.

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