odorama
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I smelled a little girl and I liked it?
Once upon a time, on a warm afternoon in May, I followed Goldilocks on her adventure, one smell at a time. As she made her way through the illustrated forest on the iPad in front of me, I tapped the screen and leaned over a small cylinder for a whiff of the woods. A few seconds and a whirring sound later, the smell of pines, faint but fresh, brought the classic children's book to life. A lush green, mossy forest instantly popped into my head. And as the subtle smell started to wear off, so too did my skepticism toward olfactory technology. Or so I thought.
This TV stinks. No, really!
Once upon 1981, John Waters tried to engage his cult-ish fans with a scratch-and-sniff "Odorama" card to complement the film Polyester. This TV is not that -- in fact, it's a decidedly higher-tech approach to true Smell-O-Vision. Devised by a team of Japanese researchers at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology and demoed in prototype form at IEEE's Virtual Reality conference, the set uses four corner-mounted fans to break the fourth wall and create an immersive olfactory experience. By merging and adjusting vapors fed through these four airflows, the team can somewhat realistically trick viewers into believing the scent is coming from localized areas of the screen. We can just hear parents of the future now: "Stop sitting so close to the screen, Johnny. You're gonna pass out from the fumes." Ah, the future...
Scent generator threatens to waft Odorama into the 21st century
Finally, an invention John Waters can get behind. When the harbinger of filth brought the odiferous experience to screenings of Polyester, he took the scratch-and-sniff route -- including scents like glue and feces -- now a team of researchers at the University of California in San Diego are expanding on the smell-what-you-see concept, albeit in a much more high-tech fashion. In collaboration with the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, the team has developed a method for generating odors that could pack the appropriate hardware into a device "small enough to fit on the back of your TV." Basically, scents are produced by an aqueous solution, like ammonia, which is heated by a thin metal wire, and eventually expelled, as an odorous gas, from a small hole in its silicone elastomer housing -- and, bam! You've got Smell-O-Vision. The team has tested its method using perfumes by Jennifer Lopez and Elizabeth Taylor, but have yet to create a working prototype. For the sake of innocent noses everywhere, let's hope Mr. Waters doesn't get a whiff of this.
