What’s this? A plug-in loudspeaker? An external flash? A retina scanner? No, it’s the utterly bizarre Scentee, an aroma-generating thingamabob that gives your smartphone scent notifications. And, starting today, it’s available worldwide. How ever did we live without this?
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Can you smell a symphony? If Le Laboratoire has its way, you soon will. The contemporary art and design sensor founded by academic and scientists David Edwards in 2007 was at Wired’s 2013 event in London this week, showing their latest creation: an olfactory experience unlike any other, delivered digitally like an email or instant message.
Edwards and his former student Rachel Field revealed the second, and much more polished prototype of the Ophone at the show, which is a cylindrical device that rests atop a base supplied with a number of chemicals. It’s a “phone” in some respects, as its name implies, but it doesn’t transmit sound or receive sounds like your iPhone: It can receive encoded transmissions that tell it what kind of smells to play.
No, that’s not a typo. Here’s how the prototype works: First, you go to a website and enter in a number of ‘movements’ for a ‘symphony,’ choosing a type of coffee, then a chocolate, then a caramel and a nut variety. Then, you can send this off to the Ophone’s servers, and it’s received by a smartphone that controls the device, which transmits the recipes via bluetooth. The Ophone combines its materials in the required complication to render those smells.
The experience is the latest from the collective around scent and taste, as Edwards continues to try to explore the nature of olfactory processes as another type of communication on par with music, writing or anything else we might hope to offer up. Already, the company offers up capsules that spritz small serving doses of things like coffee, reduced to a fine dust, which can be brought on planes and are completely travel and customs safe.
The more interesting possibility for the future, according to Edwards, is a vision where delivery mechanisms for the olfactory units are built-into every device, making it possible for your cell phone, TV remote control or anything else to offer up a scent shot. That’s what the company hopes to accomplish, given more time to refine the product and work out a final production Ophone-type device.
“In the next few years we’re absolutely moving towards a world where you have these little chips, they’re universal, and you have any number of objects they work with,” he said. “It could be the holder of your phone, your desk or something in your clothing, so that any communication, whether it’s on the phone, or an email, or an Internet site or a James Bond movie, that has an inherent olfactory dimension, if you turn this on, you’re going to be smelling it.”
The Ophone is currently the most advanced iteration of that vision. It’s much, much better than the typical smell-o-vision type inventions you’ll see trotted out at trade shows, as I learned via a nose-on. That’s because it’s remarkably subtle, and remarkably personal. There’s no haze of smell you have to walk through, for instance; and when you want the experience to end, you just draw you head back and the smell quickly fades.
Currently, the Ophone prototype can produce up to 320 different smells, and working out the UI for that experience is its own challenge. Field says that they came up with the idea of symphonies, and the basic set scent selection as a way of making it more digestible, but in fact its extremely flexible, and they’re interested to see what people are able to come up with to interact with it once its more generally available. You can easily imagine a situation where people come up with various “scent recipes” and “scent apps” like they do now for lighting with the Philips Hue.
The concept of a smell-based media device isn’t new, and it’s been applied to everything from TV to gaming, but the Ophone and the larger vision behind Le Laboratoire envision a much more expansive application of olfactory sense tech. It’s still pretty sci-fi, but it’s a lot more palatable (and eligible for consumerization) in this form than having a fog machine shoot a foul-smelling cloud in your direction, which is how others’ efforts have come off in the past.
Have you had trouble shaking that fear of snakes or dogs or spiders? Researchers from Northwestern University have developed a new technique to rechannel memories while subjects sleep—by blasting them with various odors. It’s like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in Smell-o-Vision.
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These days, even a cheap phone has the ability to record sights and sounds using its camera. But that’s just two of our many senses. With her concept for an “odor camera”, designer Amy Radcliffe hopes that she can encourage electronics makers to make devices that can record scent.
Amy named her scent recorder Madeleine, after the French pastry popularized in Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Time. In the novel, the pastry – combined with the taste of tea – causes a character to remember something from the past (I wonder if Amy realizes that that scene involves the sense of taste, not the sense of smell). To record a scent with Madeleine, you place its funnel over the object whose scent you want to record. Madeleine’s pump will suck the air surrounding the object and mix it with a resin. Then you send that mixture to a fragrance lab. The lab will replicate the scent and send the replica back to you.
In an interview with The Atlantic, Amy said she deliberately imagined a slow development process for the Madeleine because she wants to bring back the curation that consumers had to enforce back in the days of film photography. Nowadays we can take dozens of pictures in an hour then forget we even have them – or what’s in them – before the day ends. But with film, you had to choose which pictures to develop. In other words, you had to choose which memories to keep. Now imagine if you could keep a thousand scents in your phone. You’d be tweeting recordings of stranger’s farts every 10 seconds. #IRegretNothing.
[via Amy Radcliffe & The Atlantic via The Verge]
I’m okay with using a microfiber cloth to clean the display on my gadgets and my computer. But if your nose is sensitive enough that it can smell the oil, dirt and whatever substance is left on your screen, watch out for Elecom’s new touchscreen cleaners. Aside from containing germ-killing ethanol and dirt-scrubbing surfactant, they also have various fragrances.
The scented cleaners are sold in either small spray-on bottles or equally tiny wet microfiber cloths. But even if you get the spray-on cleaner, Elecom recommends that you spray them on a piece of clean cloth first then apply the cloth to your gadget’s screen instead of spraying the cleaner on your screen directly. Probably because some of the liquid might find its way inside your gadget.
Elecom will make the cleaners available in Japan starting this month. The tissue will sell for ¥640 (~$6 USD) for a pack of 5 tissues while a 7ml bottle of the liquid cleaner will go for ¥1,323 (~$13). If that sounds too expensive to you, there are lots of guides online about mixing your own screen cleaning solution. Maybe you can add a fragrance to those recipes. Or the scent of a new computer. Or booger bits. Whatever floats your boat.
[via Elecom via Akihabara News]
“For example, suppose you want to send a message to a friend via a social network, maybe because you know your friend is tired. You can use this to send a relaxing scent along with your message. You can also use it to add scent to the notification sound whenever you get a new e-mail. We also think this device could be used with games. It could have all kinds of applications, so for example, in a shooting game, shots could be accompanied by the smell of gunpowder.”
“Regarding our business model, the idea is that customers will be able to buy all kinds of scents in tanks like this.”
“When we release this, we’d like to offer several kinds of game and social content ourselves. We’ve already released an SDK that links applications and devices. So, we hope that developers, both companies and individuals, will turn lots of ideas into apps.”
“This is still a prototype and it uses the dock connector compatible with smartphones up to the iPhone 4S. We’d also like to support Android phones, so our version for release this September will connect to the phone’s earphone jack. The design will also be a lot more stylish. So, this is really something to look forward to.”
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