Have you ever been homesick and missed the smell of your mother’s cooking? Or wished you could smell your lover’s perfume or cologne when you’re away? Well, there are developers who are working to make that a reality with the “oPhone.”
Dr. David Edwards, a biomedical engineer at Harvard and founder of Le Laboratoire, a company known to produce radical sensory products, is the head of this interesting new product. He is working with Paris perfumers Givaudan and baristas Café Coutume to create a menu of scents, which will be contained in “oChips.” Eyal Shahar, an electrical engineer from MIT, designed containers that will release the scent when heated by the touch of button, but then quickly cool in order to keep smells distinct and localized, something that has been historically difficult in olfactory experimentation. When someone sends a message using the scent menu on their oPhone, the receiver’s phone would use its own menu to recreate the scent that was sent (tee hee). Up to 365 combinations will be available in the first wave of oPhones which are slated to go into beta testing in July.
“Biologically we respond powerfully to aroma, so if we become familiar with the design of aromatic communication we might be able to say things we couldn’t before”, says Edwards.
Although the first batch of phones will only be available to a select few customers, the first olfactory social network will be more inclusive.
A free app will allow anyone to compose and send a smell note by text or email, based on a set menu of aromas and variations. The message can be received by any normal phone as a text. The recipient can then download the composition from hotspots which will be set up in the launch city of Boston.
Oooookaaaay. I personally can’t see me getting wrapped up in smell texts, but to each his own. I wonder to what extent this will numb our senses of smell? Or cloud the air with random scents? And what if someone send you a smell that you do not want to experience? No, thanks.
Although Edwards is using his olfactory research for nostalgia and novelty, there are some who are trying to use it for medical advancement. Monell Chemical Senses Center is seeking to find smell biomarkers in cancer patients to see if they can create an “e-nose” that would be able to smell chemicals in the blood to delivery an early diagnosis. The idea was inspired by the fact that dogs can often smell sickness on humans.