Slashdot Mirror
Practical Applications of Smell Recordings
ozmanjusri writes to mention a Tokyo Institute of Technology project to record scents for later playback. The New Scientist article suggests this technology could be used in commercials and medical applications. From the article: "Simply point the gadget at a freshly baked cookie, for example, and it will analyse its odour and reproduce it for you using a host of non-toxic chemicals. The device could be used to improve online shopping by allowing you to sniff foods or fragrances before you buy, to add an extra dimension to virtual reality environments and even to assist military doctors treating soldiers remotely by recreating bile, blood or urine odours that might help a diagnosis."
Yay! Now I will be able to smell decomposing bodies when I watch CSI...
(end of post)
Imagine what a computer virus attacking that could do. Now in addition to having pop-ups, loud noises, and other issues, your computer can smell like vomit when you visit that unscrupulous porn or warez site!
What is mankind really? Well, it's just two words put together Mank, and ind.
In 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...
This is literally vaporware!
Viper is the preferred editor of the Emacs operating system.
Whoa... This could be dangerous! Think of the BO!
echo YOUR_OPINION >
"reproduce it for you using a host of non-toxic chemicals"
i lol'd
"Think of the astronomical odors you'll smell thanks to me!"
This would be great for the next generation fart machine. You hear it and smell it.
... a "recording" of my ex-coworker. Let's just say that he brought a whole new meaning to "old fart." I'll leave it at that. Your imaginations can fill out the rest, but they definitely won't do it justice. Nothing can. Except a "smell recording." That alone would give me nightmares.
"Yay! Now I will be able to smell decomposing bodies when I watch CSI..."
That's also known as "con funk".
God knows the Big Mac doesn't look good unless it is on TV, so do you think they wil give you the real smell? I find most intrusions in my home annoying and this will go on the list as well. Limited applications? Sure. But please, PLEASE do not assault my sense of smell with what market research shows to be your grandma's fresh baked cookie scent. I don't even like scented candles for God's sake.
Scooter, which one is it? Dick or George? I am sure that it can not Karl.
A Company named DigiScents tried this during the boom. Shockingly enough, the company folded. From Wired, Nov. 99/a.
Karma: Can only be portioned out by the Cosmos.
I smell a rat.
Pandering to the lowest common denominator would be less frequent if more people were prime numbers.
Carl Stalling sez, "It will never work!"
PORN! You could smell her! Thinking about this further, it seems hilarious, insightful, scary, invigorating, fulfilling, unclean, erotic, and brilliant! TIGHT.
Bring on the perfume pirates. If you can record it, you can pirate it!
They were advertising the "sex suit" only for women, it's crazy that they are trying to put sex on the internet before something useful.
Ah well, sex sells. Even weird kinky smell sex, just include a "urine smell" and you'll sell to perverts everywhere!
With a device like that you could record and leave the stinkiest farts around and play great pratical jokes.
I think it was in one of the Feist books where the guild of thieves kept one of their headquarters' secret entrances concealed by throwing a dead cat into it once per week, which I find rather clever.
Would the smell of rotting meat be more effective than a loud siren as a burglar alarm? ("Call the police, honey, I think somebody died in there").
Would stores buy "smell printers" to pipe the smell of popcorn or fresh-baked bread near the high-margin retail shelves? Conceal the true value of a shelf of wines by piping in the smell of Grange Hermitage over the top? Bad smells near the cash office or complaints desk?
Could we truly be led around by our noses by people who installed these things commercially? Niven and Barnes made low-grade smell manufacture ("Neutral Scent") a plot element in the original Dream Park, which I think was some sort of unscented pheremone base. It's value was in the fact that the effect was totally and completely stealthy.
I'd be scared, if I had a sense of smell left.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I wonder if this could be used to recreate perfume. imagine a $200 bottle of the stinky stuff being cheaply cloned by this device.
It shouldn't be hard to hack it up for mass production.
And extracting those chemicals that make it up? Then you could have all the cheap perfumes for alot less. Maybe you'd even be able to synthetically 'taste' what you smell. Cooking for guests and screw up the chicken? Just baste with synthetic smell and nobody will know the truth!
At least one smell will suffice for Microsoft, the Bush Administration, the RIAA/MPAA, and AT&T.
I think I'll call it 'Brown'.
of bile in the morning. Smells like... Diagnosis.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Think about how an odor producing agent, mercaptan, is added to natural gas so that people can more easily detect dangerous gas leaks. Likewise, think of how silly those scenes in movies where someone is doused in or surrounded by a liquid that is gasoline without realizing it are not very plausible -- you just know that person would smell the fumes and not light a match or do anything to create a spark.
:-)
There are certain smells that get our attention, not because they are unpleasant, but because they signify something important, perhaps even life threateningly dangerous! When you smell something burning, you almost automatically look around to see where the odor is coming from or if there is visible smoke or fire; unless, of course, you are the sort who can burn almost anything (water?) when trying to cook a meal.
Olfactory signals might be terribly useful if they could be produced on demand in a very controlled manner. Animals can often tell a lot more about the world around them because they have well developed senses of smell. Humans lack great sniffers for the most part, but we are good at creating tools (machines) to enhance our natural abilities far beyond what nature has given us. Why not make smells more useful?
Think about the possibility in cosmetics alone. Instead of trinkets such as mood rings, people might wear scent generators that convey specific meanings/moods in a decidedly non-verbal manner. Isolating scents and producing complex odors on demand is a technology that just reeks of potential!
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
I'm blacklisting Dad now. Whatever you do, don't open that email with the subject line "Barking Frog"
Imagine what you can do if instead of the 96(!) chemicals mentioned in TFA you use pheromones to 'enhance' your movie!
-- Cheers!
In regards to analysing a smell recording for medical diagnosis, couldn't you just record the smell and analyse it with software rather than having to recreate it?
He he.. Hey .. Bevis.. He He.. Pull My Finger!
Nuff said!
Surely if these can be measured it will be less complicated to produce a bar graph of the scent categories that can be read, or even auto-interpreted (e.g. this smell + this smell + this smell = cancer).
I can't imagine a medical situation that could be diagnosed by smell that couldn't be quantified. On the other hand IMNAD so please let me know if I'm wrong.
Ok, the ability to artificially record and reproduce smells is really cool.
Smellovision is not.
By the way, smells were used with some movies before I was even born. They failed utterly. Apparently they couldn't ventilate the theaters fast enough and they were stench pits before the first intermission. Somebody recently tried to add smells to the web. That also failed. I'm guessing that the same reason may have had something to do with it. But that's just a guess.
Now a more domestic use, would be more like current sensory recordings. Picture a rose, smell a rose. Picture the Corpsebloom, smell something that makes you want to throw up. But have it under the users control and limited in scope, not a moronic director or ad exec ideas of what they want. Our houses would be unlivable if they had their way. And if a prick added it to phones (nobody knows why anyone would do that) can you imagine the prank calls you'd get...
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, except when the transmission gets corrupted and makes it smell like burnt cookies.
Was there not a famous dot com company that bombed trying to use this idea?
Anything that has dot bombed increased my BS-o-meter level.
DYWYPI?
@sumdumass That won't work. The chemicals that are used to recreate the smells are probably themselves as expensive. After all they are "perfumes" too. I wonder if the smell will last for some time. That could be, in a way, disastrous to channel surfing on TV. Also would this mean that new media codecs will come into existence to standardize this? Will there be a flurry of copyrights for all kinds of smell? Would these allow the reproduction of smells for purposes other than digital entertainment? And what about new portable players like "iSmell"? And think about making "avatars" that even smell like you! I am sure lots of people like me are going to block it just like popups and only allow them through when it's something like my mom's cookies.
I can record the smell of my farts so my buddies can smell them when they gety home!
Now I finally can complain to my cable company that I don't have smell-o-vision!
BAM!
Now if I could only figure out these knobs...
"...allowing you to sniff foods or fragrances before you buy..."
I would have thought this kind of tech would be as much a nightmare for the fragrance industry (perfumes etc.) as easy and cheap reproduction of music is for the music industry.
Like the music industry the fragrance industry is selling something fairly low on utilitarian value, and very high in 'cool' (or sign) value. With the music industry people figured out some time ago that the actual product could be attained without the charge. In the fragrance industry, which is so reliant on sign value over use value that you don't even see or hear references to the supposed use value in advertisements (e.g. "CK One smells so good..."), I can imagine that they would really not want to make use of this technology. They'd want to keep the 'mystique' that surrounds the industry and probably would trot out a line like "Our fragrances are so complex and use the purest hopogo-oil and other exotic ingredients which simply can't be replicated by nasty chemicals".
It's also similar to the challenge that hopefully the diamond industry will face some day, when synthetic diamonds become acceptable to the idiots that pay for real ones. A bit of a waste of technology, but anything that causes less money to flow into these cesspools of human idiocy the better. But IMO, it won't happen with fragrances, really these companies don't even sell the barest shred of a product, just the image, so tech can't really bring them to their knees. Diamonds and music are different while still relying on sign value - you do get something in the end, and if it serves it's main purpose just as well (looking expensive/sounding cool) then the consumer will probably go to the cheaper source.
// It had been Fat's delusion for years that he could help people. --Philip K. Dick, Valis
... which I don't think it will, I can only imagine the horrors of playing through a game like Doom 3 with this sort of thing added in. It's bad enough that I have to see the terrible creatures of hell as I cut them to pieces with my chaingun, but I can only wince in fear at what they must smell like.
And, for that matter, this is going to require yet another PCI card, isn't it? Like I have all that many slots left after putting 2 GPU's, a PPU and a sound card in!
Using our NextGen microFartchitecture, we were able to process 4 smells a second, including the one of an old AMD cpu with the heatsink removed.
You know how you're always told, "Don't smell the test tubes directly!! Waft instead!" Well, wouldn't it be cool if instead of opening up a chemistry handbook, you could pull up a compound on a computer and as part of the entry it could generate its smell for you? It's a lot safer and a lot more practical than having kids huffing off a test tube to find out what the sulfur dioxide they just created smells like.
This may have downsides, and will probably bomb, but I wish it would work well. We cannot have real VR, for games, movies, etc, without smell. Now all we need is particle systems that don't suck and some type of way to "feel" the world.
Great Intellect...
i really don't want to get an email with a worm or virus that makes my cell phone/ computer smell like bayonne new jersey... or makes it produce sarin gas
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
your wife, g/f can smell her, too...
this isn't going anywhere...
..or a broadcast of a smell sample on national TV ...
.. hmm well let's see how long it takes for some chemistry guru to create toxic or narcotic smells from those non-toxic materials ...
....
... or receive Pron spam with stuff that smells like sex ...
....
Non toxic
This is no surprise to you if you are over 3rd grade, and visited one single chemistry class, but here is a refresher : there are some very basic elements out there that are completely harmless until you start mixing them together
oh great i will be able to download a bunch of funky smells, or smell the rottening flash while playing doom
thanks but no thanks
What about recording the smell of marijuana or cocaine and launching a massive Denial Of Service attack against Customs and the DEA?
:(
Woot! I hope I can read Slashdot from my cell in Gitmo.
Fake diamonds are already here. De Beers are trying to counteract the "problem" by saying things like:
"If people really love each other, then they give each other the real stone," ... "It is not a symbol of eternal love if it is something that was created last week."
with this smell recorder/player I can finally finish the automatic object tracker for my smell-o-scope.
yeah, i thought of my dad too.
;p
One practical application I can think of this late/early is in Alzheimers cause the memory of smell for a few certain objects is the first to go. Peppermint and cinnamon are two of I think 12... I'd like to say what the others are... but I forgot
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
Well, that's not such a bad idea. Viewers certainly want an enhanced sense of realism in their movies/TV, and it has been argued (and personally, I agree) that the reason violence on TV is so popular is that it's NOT realistic enough. That is, by seeing people shot on TV, but not seeing the horrible aftermath, like crying friends and devastated families etc., the attack isn't seen to do the harm that it really does. Perhaps if viewers understood the situations that such things lead to a little more, they'd be less likely to see it as glamorous. This probably applies to army recruitment too ;)
I can't see this sort of technology being used for things like games - I think it's one of those things where people are using an outdated concept to reproduce a sense - i.e. we presently fool the eyes into believing things that are not there by showing them a picture. We fool the ears by playing back a recorded sound, so lets fool the olfactory nerves by physically making a smell.
I think the only way smell will be work as part of a virtual environment such as a game will be to electronically stimulate the brain somehow to make it hallucinate the smell. If the technology existed to do that however I think we'd have bigger problems to worry about.
A real perfume/aftershave has binding agents to stick the scent to you, which such a device would not have - it would be a window into other smells, not necessarily a replacement for perfume.
In the future though scents will probably be like MP3 files and you can buy something to brighten your room.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
But you already know the real purposes such technology will be put to - SUV ads will smell of pristine forests, cordite, and female pheremones (rather than stale beer, city smog, and unwashed children); McDonalds ads will smell of freshly-cooked Wagu beef, strawberries, and fresh apples (instead of rancid fat, rancid beef, and little pus-filled pastries); Coke ads will smell of
Already, fresh-bread scent is added to the bakery section of the supermarket; roast beef scent is added to the meat section; vanilla scent is added to the frozen foods section.
Never underestimate the power of technology to exploit you. This is one of those cases where things might be better in Soviet Russia...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
I can only dream of the satisfaction gained by getting friends to navigate to tubgirl or goatse!
Smell is one of the most "direct" and unfiltered senses the human has. It doesn't go to our sensible brain, it appeals instantly to our emotional areas. Everyone has memories of certain scents, and they're often linked to very emotional states, simply because there is no "picture", no abstract ideal that we can connect to it usually, since it is not such an important sense to us. When we see something, we remember it as an abstract picture of the original, reducing it to the parts required to remember it.
Smell is recorded in whole, and only on a subconscious level. When you cuddle with your loved one, you will remember his or her scent, not consciously but on a purely emotional base. If you meet someone who uses the same fragrance, you immediately find him or her attractive, too, for the simple reason that he/she smells like the person you love.
Can anyone else see marketing go crazy over this idea? Bypass our rational filter and hit our emotions directly? I really hope you can turn that smell thingie off as soon as it becomes available for TV. Or the ads will stink even more than they already do.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Adobe SmellShop CS2, for when you need your cookies to smell better than the rivals.
Someone should start telling the blindman in the fish market joke about now.....
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
"...what if we want to smell distant objects? Well now we can! Thanks to my new invention ... the Smell-o-scope!"
"If a dog craps anywhere in the universe, you can bet I won't be out of the loop!"
...if you actually have a real fresh-baked cookie, presumably you can already smell it...so why would you need an expensive, bleeding-edge, super-smelling techno-toy?
Although if you're a Slashdot reader, I guess it's a rhetorical question.
Isn't smell the third sense (besides sight and sound) the "tricorder" recorded?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The ingredients in the average $200 French perfume bottle only cost around 2 euros (~3 dollars), and they already are synthesized. The most expensive "ingredient" in the box is the glass bottle itself.
That's also why the "old" genre of parfume masters like Artisan Parfumeur are making a comeback, using only "pure" smells.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
If this sort of technology works, it would be great for the air freshener industry. My first question is, if "they" still can't make strawberry air freshers that actually smell like strawberrys, how can they claim to be able to create other smells on demand? The next question is, if this does work, how long before we see copy protection technology applied to perfume? Seriously, if it works, this technology could be very disruptive to the perfume industry, which has the money to buy whatever laws it wants.
I do understand that smell recordings have practical uses -- what I don't believe for a second is that smell playbacks have practical uses other than making CSI audience faint and/or vomit.
For instance: if you get a really qualified doctor to smell some wound and say "whoa! we got a problem here", and then you record the smell (and analyse it) then you know what to search with an electronic nose when a soldier needs to play doctor in the battlefield.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
It seems that while humans are pretty good at smelling things, though maybe not as talented or intereste in smells as say a cat or a dog, we have a limited ability to create smells.
A massively trained organic chemist, food chemist, chef, patissier, etc. can do it in a given limited field, but we have no ability to create output in the smell spectrum that is so amazingly versatile and broadband as our bodies can sense input (including not just the nose but also connected senses of taste, heat, and reactions like eye watering or itching).
If such a thing existed as a piano or a programmatic interface to a smell generator this would let people train their sense of smell to a fine degree, perhaps enough even to sense explosives, or water, or poisonous gases at low concentrations. It could be really important in space habitats, where it is likely that telltale scents might be in the air at low concentrations before full failure of a system, especially a hydroponic or recycling system.
It would also be very useful for training people in diagnosis of disease as smell is apparently a big factor there too. You might find some interesting correlations between how well people score on smell tests and how effective they are in a given field where it is important.
Especially if it smells of, say, a fresh baked handgrenade or some tasty C4. I guess these machines will have a hard time then...
Nuff said.
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
The Tokyo Institute of Technology, aka TIT, a highly desired but unattainable destination for many nerds.
The advertising guys will love it.... Imagine it, a Pizza Hut advertisement comes on, yummy smells wafting through the air get the stomach acids pumping - call and order now! Consumers will be forced to learn yet another sales resistance technique.
And like so much Bill Gates does, he didn't come up with this observation, he probably didn't attribute it to the original source either, and afterwards people like you still attribute it to him.
a virtual planetarium? Everything in space has its own unique smell.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
I work at a sewage treatment plant. We have a website. 'nuff said.
Great now were gono have copyright laws and drms for smells. You can only smell George Bush's fart ONCE. You cannot skip through the commercial smells in the middle HEHEHEHEHHEH. poo jokes are funny :-D.
Also, I know that perfumes are going to have big problems with people stealing the smell and posting it online. I wonder what format it will be in...
Also it may get the smell right but is that all there is to it, I guess I am skeptical as I haven't seen any scales, charts or guide to quantify and measure the units of odor, where light and color has a spectrum (which can be quantified in RGB or CMYK) sound has pitch timbre, etc, does odor have a scale? Smelling a rose and smelling something with a rose scent can be two different things (not to mention the variety of roses).
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
They really want the end result, which is the smell of my butt.
Sorry, watched 2 hrs of Beavis and Butthead on DVD last night and there were butt jokes galore.
Fart knocker.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
I was thinking that you could use this for training industrial workers. By coming up with a "pretty close" reproduction of a toxic smell, you could tell the workers exactly what to be on the lookout for, without having to resort to "sort of like almonds" generalizations.
Of course, having cheap gas monitors that warn the workers in advance would be even better, but equipment has safety guards on it already, and they're not 100% effective. Lives are saved when humans notice something amiss and react promptly. As a second line of defense, training and recognition could kick in when electronic monitors fail.
A company called ScentAir sells contraptions to try to make food smell better: http://www.newsobserver.com/104/story/413546.html "Bakeries have a similar issue. They typically bake breads and pastries in the morning. By late in the day, that warm, fresh-baked smell has faded. Some bakeries blow an oven-baked-bread scent all day."
They sell smells including "French Bread", "Fresh Brewed Coffee", and "Dinosaur Dung": http://www.scentair.com/products/index.cfm?subSect ionID=1 (warning: Flash site that is a serious pain to navigate)
They link to articles like "It's Beginning to Smell (and Sound) a Lot Like Christmas: The Interactive Effects of Ambient Scent and Music in a Retail Setting" and their clients include Au Bon Pain, Food Lion, and Kroger. The marketers have found another venue--is that *really* fresh bread you're smelling?
unless, of course, you are the sort who can burn almost anything (water?) when trying to cook a meal. :-)
If I didn't know better, I would think you had met my mother!
Dear old forgetful mom would often put water on to boil and completely forget about it. Later one of us children.. she had 8 *gasp* would find a "cherry red" pot on the stove and manage to toss it into the sink to cool off with a big cloud of steam. I imagine she still has that old warped pot as it was her favorite one. So yes in a way she could "burn water" with the best of them.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I had a friend who farted into a jar, put a dollar in it, and give it to his little brother.
The reaction was worth the dollar.
How cool would it be to email farts to people.
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
This thing either has a supply of _all_ possible smells (unlikely) or tries to synthesize something 'similar'. Is this really interesting for perfume stores, where the $$$ are exactly in the subtle details. IMHO this is comparable to letting a prospective Ferrari buyer do a test drive in a Skoda.
Prof: "Here is my latest invention, the smell-o-scope. We can smell Saturn, Jupiter, and my favorite..."
Fry: "Oh no, I am not going to sniff Uranus"
Prof: "huh"
Fry: "Uranus, the planet?!"
Prof: "Oh, yes, we changed that planet's name in 2026 to get rid of that joke once and for all."
Fry: "What did you change it to?"
Prof: "Urectum"
Libertas in infinitum
Smelliest substance known to man, I think this is present in rotting meat. It is used to give natural gas a distinct and unpleasant smell. Also found in skunk's spray. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethyl_mercaptan
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
I just want to fart in the mic and email it around as a practical joke. How much more practicality does a smell-o-meter or smell-o-ceiver need.
Smell based ad's and porn of course:
Hot sweaty musky construction workers sitting down for a cold
beer after a long hard day of steel erection. The sweaty sock smell
when they take off those boots for the first time all day.
Or maybe its firemen, the smell of fresh cold beer, man musk,
and wet fireplace. mmmmmm so sexy. Enough to have you on your knees
offering gratitude for heroism... The smell of ummm well I'll leave
that to the imagination.