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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) 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)