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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!
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In 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...
This is literally vaporware!
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A Company named DigiScents tried this during the boom. Shockingly enough, the company folded. From Wired, Nov. 99/a.
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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!
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"...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.
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It is more effective in certain applications. Underground mines use Ethyl Mercaptan (stench gas) to warn workers to evacuate the mine http://www.zacon.ca/stench-gas.asp. If you've ever experienced it, you'll know there's a strong incentive to get the hell out of there.
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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.