When they finally figured out smell, everything changed.
I mean, think about your best memories. Before all of this started. The sour milk on the shagged rug of your childhood bedroom where you first read The Hobbit in front of a box-fan. The giant-eater pinecone you found in the woods behind your cousin's house on the day after Thanksgiving. The tangy sweat you slowly licked from the shoulders of your once-great love. Okay, fair enough, those are my best memories, but I'm just going to assume you're here on this odorous journey with me.
I imagine that some team of brain scientists, hot-shot psycho-cognitive researchers working on mice and monkeys and -- my favorite of the laboratory genus -- guinea pigs, finally drew the connection between a brain accepting reality - any reality, virtual, augmented, or Prime - and those tickly little hairs in our nostrils. Like so many discoveries, this one feels pathetically obvious in retrospect.
Once they nailed the monkeys and the piggies, the foot race was on between the bloated corpos and the wannabe startups to manipulate our olifactories in a layer two reality -- that is, anything other than Prime (you know -- meatspace). Would the first layer two implementation be fully digital? Or organic? How would it connect with our lenses? Another tracker-riddled implantation? These are among the many and myriad questions that were likely considered. I wish I could tell you how exactly Eagle did it, but that's a capital T Trade capital S Secret.
Eagle knows pro. Introducing the Eagle Nose Pro.
We've all seen the billboards. The Skip-Ads (as the kids say) on LoopCaster. I'm not going to say that their traditional media blitz wasn't worth it, because Eagle sold 4 billion units in the last year alone (full disclosure - my investment portfolio may include securities discussed in this LiveCast and this is for informational purposes only and consult a registered investment advisor or whatever, losers), but I'd wager they'd have done just as good on word of mouth alone. No one would shut up about the damn things. You weren't going to be the one person in your group cast who couldn't smell things in here.
The Nose Pro looks like one of those Band-Aid strips for a broken-nosed boxer. You've gotta replace the strip with a new one every 48 hours or so, or things get pretty gross (I think it starts composting itself -- hashtag environmental impact). Luckily, Eagle provides a helpful subscription service to keep your nose on track and their coffers well-stocked.
Fart apps had a nice revival immediately after the Nose Pro came out. Whoopie+ was the top AR layer on the Eagle Reality store for four months. I know the two devs behind Whoopie+, and they're dumber than you can even imagine, but, hey, they're richer than God now. C'est la vie, and pardon my toot.
Right, so, after smell hit the metaverse, next came food. Then came sleep, oddly enough. Pillows have a smell, who knew? Next, of course, was sex.
First, everyone got really hot. Cause why not? We were as Greek gods and looked like them, too (the hot ones).
Then, when hot got boring (doesn't it always?), everyone got weird. I spent at least a month layered as a werewolf with a triceratops tail and a lion's mane. That was... interesting.
Nowadays, there are all sorts of fetish tribes roaming the plains of Eagle Reality. I'm sure the Eagle execs aren't thrilled about it. Certainly it's not making their marketing campaigns. But it's keeping us horndogs glued to our goggles and lenses and strips, confined to our tiny dark apartments in Primeverse. Don't mess with a good thing, as they say.
With that all out of the way, I can finally let you know what I've been up to these last few weeks.
So, I've written a little program. A new layer app. It's called Magic Mirror. Someone in the Alexandrian Mines helped me crack Eagle's facial mapping identity enclave (shhh), which means that I can get access to the full rendering of your face, normally used to authenticate your device access.
What does this mean?
Magic Mirror renders your actual face in Eagle Reality. Not your Hephaestus-with-a-unicorn-horn face, I mean your real-deal meatspace face, with its pimples and dimples and freckles and warts and bad teeth and good teeth and lazy eyes and crooked smiles. Coupled with Eagle Smell Pro, Magic Mirror lets you really see and smell and taste another person.
And what's hotter than that?