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The Aroma of Fine Wine From Your Computer
SonomaSteve writes "Wine Spectator Magazine is reporting on a new computer accessory that could have you smelling fine Burgundy wine over the web. The prototype, called Olfacom, is being developed by France Telecom and showcased by the Bureau Interprofessionnel des Vins de Bourgogne (BIVB.) The technology uses 'essential oils' stored in several tanks inside the peripheral to generate aromas like hay, flowers and fruit. Will Olfacom be more successful than DigiScents? The French say, 'Mais, oui!'"
It's not nice to tease people with the aromas of fine wine and leave it at that. We want to be able to taste it too!
If you'd RTFA, you'd realize that not only are they not attempting to actually duplicate the aromas of fine wines, but that a critic has already made the exact complaint that you did.
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...Smell-O-Vision *was* a short-lived movie fad in 1960. During the 50s in particular the movie industry tried lots of gimmicks (e.g. 3D) to counter the rising popularity of TV. The only one that really took hold (unfortunately in the view of many directors) was widescreen. One would think that all the people pursuing computer smell attachments would have learned from that experience.
Smell is based on shape. The shape of the molecule seems to be what determines how it smells. Thus it's hard to achieve a small just through mixing. Further, your idea kind of contradicts itself. You note that we can create synthetic smells and tastes, yet then think this can be applied to something like fine wine. Well one thing you'll notice with the synthetics is that they aren't the real thing. They may resemble it to some degree, but they are quite far off. Eat a strawberry candy, then a real strawberry and tell me that they are the same thing.
For something like fine wine, where the smell is subitle and complex, it would totally fall flat. I mean that's what really makes fine alcohol fine. Wine smells and tastes like wine, be it jug wine or $300/bottle. However the finer vintages are more mellow, and have unique flavours and smells. Getting a synthetic to simulate something like the basic wine taste is probably no problem. Getting it to be like Opus One or Domaine de Chevalier is a whole different story.
However there is no obvious way to mix smell of vanilla with smell of creosote and get the smell of rose, for example. Furthermore, you can not get the smells of varying roses by changing the amount of creosote or vanilla. Smells are not very additive.
This still doesn't mean that such a device is impossible. It only means that you need many different "essential oils" (a.k.a. stinky liquids) to generate some good number of smells.
But on the other hand such a device does not have to generate many smells. A marketdroid may be happy if each "oil" generates just one smell, and that's it - the device just can make 10 or 20 smells at all. This would be acceptably good to accompany TV ads, for example.
However I see no way in hell a device like this can recreate a smell of some good wine. It is even hardly possible to do in a chemical lab. Wine is quite a complex product. Year and age of the wood used to make the barrels may make a big difference; those 10 or so oils can't even approach that precision; I would be even surprised if they can recreate the smell of common beer - because they'd need to stock up on some yeast products among those oils, and these wouldn't last long in that cartridge.
The previous device failed, and this one is likely to follow. The main reason to that is not its limited spectrum of smells, but the absence of any need for the device. Sense of smell is not very strong in humans, and we are not driven by it as we are driven by vision or by hearing. There are theaters of vision (movies), there are theaters of word (drama) and music (opera etc.) but no smell theaters. We are just mostly blind to smells.
just ran across it the other night..
Trisenx.com
They make some kind of scent dome that uses refillable cartridges.. connects to the computer via serial...
looks like an expensive useless piece of crapola...