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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...
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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.
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.
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.
PORN! You could smell her! Thinking about this further, it seems hilarious, insightful, scary, invigorating, fulfilling, unclean, erotic, and brilliant! TIGHT.
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.
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"
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.
"...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
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.
..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 ...
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... or receive Pron spam with stuff that smells like sex ...
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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.
Not a bad idea. You could imagine using the same technique to train soldiers to detect chemical agents, or to train emergency response workers to detect chemical hazards. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be the fireman who has to search our lab after a major earthquake. I *know* what xenon difluoride and sulfuric acid smell like, and I'd still be scared to set foot in that place after a major shakeup.
The article makes it sound as though their device can hit 96 of 347 possible signatures. The question is whether it's possible to accurately reproduce the scent of dangerous substances with harmless ones. (I'm no biologist, much less an expert on olfaction - it could well be that the set of smells we actually encounter involve a much smaller basis that's spanned by the 96 already included.)
But, if you ask me, the "practical applications" the article mentions are still pretty far from practical. The only possibility that seems viable in the short term is being able to accurately reproduce a scent in order to add a single specific scent to an environment or product without spending hours of trial-and-error work in the lab. Bake fresh bread with a hundred slightly different recipes, find out which one is most appealing, and then copy it and add the smell to your vending-machine-biscuit production line. (I can only imagine that happens already, just less efficiently.)
By the time immersive virtual reality gets to a point where adding scent is anything but a dumb, distracting gimmick, I suggest that it will be far easier to throw a bit of scent directly at our brain rather than messing around with our noses.
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.
"...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 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.
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.