14 DAY TRIAL // Smell, the final frontier. Or was it Smell, the fourth dimension? Or “scent” instead of smell? For something that has been an essential part of life, smell has to be the most understated and ignored of the five senses. Not anymore, though.
It's actually kind of funny, really, that people are finally wising up to the fact that they do, in fact, have senses beside sight, hearing and touch to build technology around.
Not that touch is that much farther ahead of smell, considering that tactile feedback is just a minor concern for makers of peripherals. Touching has mostly been seen as a means to control technology, rather than a sense that should be stimulated.
Still, smell has been largely ignored so far, with the exception of one or two cinemas that tried to add it as a “fourth dimension” to films.
Now, though, with visual and audio technologies advancing about as quick as they ever could, engineers and scientists are finally exploring the possibilities of scents.
Case in point, Harvard Professor David Edwards and his co-inventor Rachel Field have electronically sent an image tagged with a scent from the American Museum of Natural History (Manhattan, New York, USA) to Le Laboratoire, a contemporary art and design center in Paris.
As a response, Parisian Fragrance Chemist Christophe Laudamiel has sent a Parisian scent back to the museum. Essentially, this was the “test sniff” of the oPhone device ("o" stands for olfactory). If a plane can have a test flight and a speaker system a test tune, then the oPhone can have a test sniff.
The device uses aromatic cartridges to reproduce the scent at the source. The messages are called oNotes, and could be used to send teasing images of steaming cups of coffee, or flower fragrances, etc.
The oSnap mobile app can be used to combine scents from 32 primitive aroma chips into any one of 300,000 different scents, according to Vapor Communications officials (Vapor Communications is the company that created the oPhone).
At the moment, only images can be tagged with scent. And, as you may have guessed, no smells are actually beamed across the ocean. Teleporting technology hasn't come that far just yet.
Instead, the scents are transmitted as text, e-mail or tweets, so that they can be picked up at Wi-Fi hotspots, provided an oPhone is there to reproduce it. A single oPhone will cost $149 / €149 on Indiegogo (once the crowd-funding campaign goes up), but the retail price will be of $199 / €199 (probably later this year or in early 2015).