Capturing Smells On Camera, Sending Smells Via Smartphone

Smell-O-Vision has long been talked about but has not been able to make a strong case for sticking around. Too many foul odors that people wouldn’t want wafting through their living rooms, I suppose. Sure, cooking shows would be great, but crime shows? Probably not so much.

But still, the idea of capturing smells and saving them for future use is intriguing.

Sending Scents with Your Smartphone

While Radcliffe is working out Madeleine’s kinks, a Japanese company by the name of Chaku Perfume is working with smells in a different way. According to Rocket News, the company has developed an iPhone add-on called Chat Perf that would allow you to send smells via text message or email.

The USB device attaches to your iPhone and the screen displays a “puff” button. Once tapped, the “tank” produces a puff of the smell. Chat Perf allows people to send smells to one another, as long as the other person has the same tank.

The device is currently only for the iPhone, but this Fall the company is hoping to release one which would connect to any Smartphone through the headphone jack, opening up the market to Android phones as well.

In addition, Chaku Perfume came out with a software development kit to see what hackers might do with the technology, and so other apps can begin to make use of the device. The goal is to be able to send scents, but the company points out many other uses for Chat Perf.

For example, a travel company could send out little samples of scents from destinations such as the beach or a cabin in the woods. It would be a memorable way to get a person’s attention and make them want to visit there. Another idea would be in the gaming market. Someone playing a military or shooting game could actually smell the gunpowder, the company points out.

Also online recipes and cooking blogs could provide the ability to smell a recipe before you cook! It is one thing to see the cake but to smell it baking would certainly put anyone in the cooking mood!

The possibilities to incorporate this technology into everyday life are really quite vast but only time will tell the extent to which scent capturing will affect daily routine.

Needless to say, if this kicks off social media will probably be the first to begin advertising the option to share your smell in order to produce an even more sensory description of your life as you live it.

Scents on Camera

Take a second to think of your favorite smell. Maybe it is homemade bread, a soft summer rain, the beach or even a loved one’s perfume. Whatever it is, chances are when you thought about it other reminiscent thoughts surfaced because our sense of smell is closely tied to our memory. In fact, familiar scents can trigger stronger memories than sight but they are also more difficult to come by.

The only way to purposefully look back on a fond memory is to take a picture and gaze at it every once in a while; even if you try to recreate the scents associated with a particular time in your life it is difficult to do, often times happenstance alone allows us to connect with the smells of our past.
Until now.

Madeleine

Designer Amy Radcliffe has created a way to capture smells on camera.
Madeleine is an analogue scent camera based on Headspace Capture – technology designed to help perfume makers capture and recreate different scents.

Gizmag.com explains that it works on a molecular level. First, the olfactory source gets situated under Madeleine’s glass dome. Then a pump siphons out the aroma, which can take anywhere from a few minutes to an entire day, depending on the strength and pungency of the smell.

The smell is then sent to the main part of the device where a resin trap collects the scent particles like a sieve, recording the smell’s molecular information.

A special lab then turns the data Madeleine collected into a bronze disc with the smell’s specific formula printed on it, as well as storing some in glass vials. This allows the smell to be reproduced artificially in the future, anytime someone wants to smell grandma’s fresh baked cookies.

    Andrew

About the Author:

Andrew works for Phoenix TS and regularly contributes to the IT Security Blog.