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This fall, the start-up Vapor Communications, for example, will introduce several devices to include subtle scents with books, movies and clothing. And the company will start mass production of its oPhone Duo, a tabletop device that can emit scents based on how an iPhone photo is labeled.
Another company, Scentee, already has a scent product on the market. The product, also called Scentee, is a cartridge that plugs into a smartphone's headphone jack. It can be set up with an app to emit a puff of fragrance when a text message or email arrives.
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All of the products depend on a small pellet called an oChip — the "o" in the product names is for olfactory. In the oPhone, each chip contains from one to four aromas. The chips are sold in packets of eight, grouped into "families" of similar smells, called Coffee, Foodie and Memory. A person who wants to describe the smell of a pasta sauce, for example, could choose notes of tomato, rosemary and parsley, which would then command the player to position those chips so the air would flow over them, combining the scents.
Adding smell to entertainment would make it immersive, but do you really want to experience the odors when our heroes get trapped in the trash compactor on the Death Star?
Original Source
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @06:23PM
smell is the oldest sense we have (earliest sense that appeared along our evolution), therefore smells combine with everything our brain does in very profound ways (including the fact that smells trigger memories like nothing else can).
smells are unique, in the sense that we can always decompose the smell of a "thing" into individual smells (as opposed to colors, where we can't tell whether something is yellow or a combination of red and green, since that's the way the eye works), therefore a lot of samples would be needed if only to make up regular smells.
my opinion? since so much about smells is handled by our subcounscious, we won't really be able to put this particular sense into "suspension of disbelief" mode, especially since it would be so monumentally hard to actually fake smells.
or maybe I'm stupid...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @06:36PM
http://www.feingold.org/strawberry.html [feingold.org]
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday July 13 2015, @07:14PM
And surprisingly enough, we suck at it. Though, I suppose we had to sacrifice olfactory real estate to allow for a bigger brain.
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Monday July 13 2015, @07:15PM
Faking smells is not an unsolvable problem. All you have to do is to release some chemicals into the air, so something like a little box with 100 or so common smelly compounds could work, I reckon.
The fun part is if it can be hacked so that a combination of common smells is perceived as a fart. Think of all the stink instant messages, stink emails, and stink blog pictures we will be enjoying on a daily basis. Sniff.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anne Nonymous on Tuesday July 14 2015, @12:41AM
> a little box with 100 or so common smelly compounds
Great. And just what do you suppose HP will charge for that cartridge?
(Score: 2) by TK on Tuesday July 14 2015, @04:12PM
I'm trying to enjoy some honey suckle, but the fart catridge is almost empty, so my HP Smell-O-Vision refuses to work.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Tuesday July 14 2015, @03:25AM
It's more complicated than that. While pixels can be turned on and off at will at 50-120Hz (or more depending on your television's refresh rate), and while sound only lasts as long as a show's director wants it to, smells have to diffuse through the air which means that you will receive the smell at a time not controllable by the show's producer since it is more of a factor of how far from the set you are, the current temperature and humidity of the air, any air currents, etc. Also smells tend to linger. Do you really want to still be smelling that "stench of death" from the gruesome body finding scene when the show has moved on to the happy meeting of the star and his love interest at the pizza joint? Consider the fact that even sound is inconvenient for many shows which completely ignore the speed of sound and give you the thunderclap at the same exact time as the flash of lightning because dramatic effect must take precedence over mere physics. So imagine something as inconvenient and unmanageable as smell. It can't be used creatively at all. The only thing it can be (aside from a short lived novelty) is a nuisance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @10:35AM
Or then instead of releasing chemicals we could plugin to the nerves where the signal is electric. Perhaps this will be one of the killer applications the gov will try to sell the chip in your head to you. (via corps. of course)
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Monday July 13 2015, @09:19PM
Sadly, I only see this getting perfected/used for making advertising more insidious.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday July 14 2015, @12:53PM
I can't speak to the general case, but in this at least, you are not stupid :-)
I find that many of the scents that are composed do not smell at all like what they are supposed to. Unfortunately, too many of them smell of the cesspool to me. Imagine riding in a train and 5 or 6 of the other passengers splashed their faces with water from the cesspool that morning! Talk about toilet water!
It really is just a matter of how they compose the scents. Actual flowers and essential oils from flowers smell good to me, but fake flower scent is hit and miss.