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Smell Camera Snapshots Scents For the Future

Posted by samzenpus on from the a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-smells dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Designer Amy Radcliffe has created an 'analog odor camera' that can be used to recreate a smell. From the article: 'When a smell source is placed under the device's glass cone, a pump extracts the smell via a plastic tube. After being drawn to Madeleine's main unit, the smell goes through a resin trap which absorbs the particles so molecular information can be recorded. That data is expressed in a graph-like formula, which essentially contains a fingerprint of the smell. In a special lab, that formula can then be inscribed on a bronze disk to artificially reproduce the smell. The smell can also be recreated in small vials.'"

24 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Cheap Perfume by Master+Moose · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I cannot see the big scent manufacturers liking this one. .

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    . . .gone when the morning comes
    1. Re:Cheap Perfume by idbeholda · · Score: 2

      Eaux De Feces

    2. Re:Cheap Perfume by iggymanz · · Score: 3, Funny

      no worries, the reproduced scent would be approximate. this has been tried before with collection of supposed "primary scents" but with little success when judged by real human noses.

        I predict a limited market for augmenting internet porn.

    3. Re:Cheap Perfume by postbigbang · · Score: 2, Interesting

      One person's scent of smashed peanut powder is another person's death. Hacking a scent generator seems both easy, and protections dubious at best.

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    4. Re:Cheap Perfume by Meski · · Score: 2

      Are people allergic to the smell of peanuts, produced synthetically, or the real thing?

    5. Re:Cheap Perfume by vlad30 · · Score: 2

      Tub Girl now with real aroma ! NO THANKS!!!

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      Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
    6. Re:Cheap Perfume by iggymanz · · Score: 3, Informative

      the reaction is to several proteins found in peanuts, something that "smells like peanuts" but not containing specific allergens would not trigger immune reaction.

    7. Re:Cheap Perfume by iggymanz · · Score: 3, Interesting

      similar proteins are found in two other plants, lupin (a legume) and Fenugreek (not a legume), and people with peanut allergies often react to those as well.

    8. Re:Cheap Perfume by TheInternetGuy · · Score: 2

      I cannot see the big scent manufacturers liking this one. .

      Get ready for the Digital Smellenium Act.

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    9. Re:Cheap Perfume by FatdogHaiku · · Score: 2

      Eau Shit!

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      You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
    10. Re:Cheap Perfume by __aaltlg1547 · · Score: 2

      What's described is a smell recording device. The smell reproducing device is another machine, and much more difficult to make, methinks.

    11. Re:Cheap Perfume by davydagger · · Score: 3, Insightful

      goatse and tubgirl get a whole new dimension.

      the only people who will use this are trolls

    12. Re:Cheap Perfume by Razgorov+Prikazka · · Score: 3, Funny

      Why? Because someone scent you an email?

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  2. Moderator is drunk again by Princeofcups · · Score: 3, Funny

    "In a special lab, that formula can then be inscribed on a bronze disk to artificially reproduce the smell." What, is this from the Church of Mormon?

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    The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
    1. Re:Moderator is drunk again by icebike · · Score: 3, Funny

      Actually it said:

      In a special lab, that formula can then be inscribed on a bronze disk to artificially reproduce the smell. The smell can also be recreated in small vials.'"

      Neither of these sound optimum. What you would want is the building blocks of those scents stored in little plastic ink-jst like cartridges, each holding half a dozen or so different molecule mixtures. It would be vitally important to size these cartridges so that the most common components would be in the smallest cells, such that it would run out first, requiring you to buy the entire cartridge well before the rest of the compounds were exhausted, You also want to be sure it isn't refillable.

      Then you can almost give the smell generator away, and make a fortune selling smell-cartridges.
      This would allow you to sell the entire patent structure to HP, and retire on your profits, and thumb your noses (figuratively and literally) at the world by releasing the first Olfactory Goatse.

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      Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
  3. New perfume by PPH · · Score: 5, Funny

    Chanel No. 0x05

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  4. Can't believe this made it past the editors by bshell · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is vapourware. Perhaps pun intended. Imaginative, kind of, but such devices have been predicted since the early 1900s. Never comes to market. Why? Headspace analysis is super expensive. Even the right library of molecular signatures, which would be needed to interpret the output of the GC/Mass Spec is in the neighbourhood of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then you need a really good GC/Mass Spectrometer machine. Or at least a really good Gas Chromatograph. All this is very expensive, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars neighbourhood. And that's JUST TO FIND OUT WHAT MAY BE IN THE SMELL. Then you need a professional perfumer and a perfume house with thousands of fresh organic compounds available to reblend the smell. This is a million dollar project, or at the very least tens of thousands for each "photograph". Prohibitively expensive. I cannot believe a moderator let this one through at slashdot. Oh well.

    1. Re:Can't believe this made it past the editors by Dracos · · Score: 2

      Well, now that the folly that is 3d TV/movies is all but dead (again), what makes you think the TV and film industries aren't working to bring the long-awaited Smell-O-Vision to market?

    2. Re:Can't believe this made it past the editors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      So you're saying that it doesn't pass the smell test?

    3. Re:Can't believe this made it past the editors by bshell · · Score: 2

      Perhaps you are not a chemist. When you say, "You merely want something that smells like them," how do you characterize that smell in the first place? Are you aware that there is no system for doing this today? Smell is not like light or sound, where there is a well understood spectrum of vibrations or frequencies and all you have to do is duplicate those frequencies. Nobody knows what smell is. If we knew that, then "smell photographs", as well as copiers, smell-phones and even "smell glasses" to correct anosmia as we have glasses to correct myopia would exist. But they don't. Why? Because there IS NO SYSTEM TO CLASSIFY SMELLS. Rather, there are dozens of systems and none of them work. A chemist cannot synthesize a molecule and say in advance what it will smell like. They might be able to say, "this will smell fish-like or ammonia-like, or fruity, or floral, but they cannot say: "this will smell exactly like that vase of flowers." This is not possible with today's science. So your response makes no sense. The closest thing we have to this is what is called "head-space analysis", a technique that is VERY expensive and in fact requires a human nose at the end of the gas chromatograph to work. That "nose" does not come cheap. Experts that do this sort of thing are paid very well and there are not many of them in the world. The reason why the flavour and fragrance industry is a multi-billion industry is because none of this is easy. While it would seem that science has figured out smell, in actual fact smell remains one of the bigger mysteries of science. It's pretty much unknown how it works. There are theories, but none of them work to enable chemists to "merely create something that smells like something", to paraphrase your initial conjecture. And "coffee smellers and perfume smellers" don't actually create smells. They take compounds either derived from natural products or synthesized by chemists and combine them in ways that smell correct. By the way: this is an art, and it's VERY VERY hard to do.

    4. Re:Can't believe this made it past the editors by bshell · · Score: 2

      The difference here is that in the early days of photography we knew that light created images, and we knew that lenses refracted light in such a way that we could capture it. We also had silver halide which changed from clear to black on exposure to light. In other words, we had a lot of technologies based on light that we understand. At the moment this simply does not exist for the sense of smell.

    5. Re:Can't believe this made it past the editors by bshell · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Smell receptors are very similar to immune system receptors. They are designed to use combinatorics so that they can "identify" on the order of trillions of different shaped molecules. In fact they are designed to "detect" molecules that have never even been invented. The mathematics of smell combinatorics is what makes it (currently) an intractable problem. Also, I believe we only know what a few of the human smell receptors detect, in terms of molecular shape and smell. It's extremely difficult to conduct experiments on smell--i.e. on how smell receptors work--in human subjects. There are countless problems and this is why smell remains a mystery. This story is not about *science*. It's about an Art Project. As long as you treat the original post as a fanciful work of art, all is fine. As soon as you assume that anything like that can be created with present day technology you are off in dreamland.

    6. Re:Can't believe this made it past the editors by sjames · · Score: 2

      There is decent evidence that people buy the 3-D discs because that's what's on the shelf and they work fine in 2D. They buy the 3D TV because it costs the same and has a few other nice features. The one thing that isn't selling is the 3D glasses to go with the TV since they have no use other than 3D viewing.

      The movies aren't down, but they're not up either. It seems like people are mostly indifferent to 3D with a sub-group that can't watch them for various reasons.

      The Queen's Christmas address was also 3d (for some reason) but nobody bothered.

      Your multi-image idea is interesting and a bit amusing to picture as well, but I'm not sure people will want to wear the glasses for that.

  5. And you thought..... by MasseKid · · Score: 2

    And you thought autoplay ads with sound were bad, just wait, autoplay ads with smells are coming. And then will come the trolling....