scentee
Latest
The sights and scents of the Sensorama Simulator
Welcome to Time Machines, where we offer up a selection of mechanical oddities, milestone gadgets and unique inventions to test out your tech-history skills. You're perched atop a motorcycle, cruising through Brooklyn with the wind whipping through your hair. A faint waft of indefinable city-funk hits your nose and the rumbling of the engine rattles your backside. Then your tokens run out. You've just experienced the Sensorama Simulator, a machine from 1962 that played a 3D film along with stereo sound, aromas and wind in order to create an immersive sensory environment. It was one of many 3D-related creations that visionary inventor and cinematographer Morton Heilig gave the world. His ideas for adding layers of sensory stimuli to augment a simple cinema presentation led the way towards today's "virtual reality" experiences.
Scentee's smelly smartphone notifications are now available worldwide
If you were crestfallen when you heard that Scentee's fragrance-emitting smartphone add-on would be hard to get outside of Japan, you can relax -- it's now available worldwide through the company's site. The perfume plug-in sells for $35 by itself (plus a whopping $30 in shipping), while scent packs for coffee, lavender, rose, rosemary and strawberry will cost you $5 each. That's quite a lot to pay for smell-based notifications on your Android device or iPhone, but Scentee is at least more practical than some of the other novelty imports that we've seen as of late.
Daily Roundup: McLaren's futuristic P1 'hypercar,' Moto X price drop, Scentee hands-on and more!
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Why have normal smartphone notifications when you can use the smell of bacon?
Scentee wants to expand your smartphone horizons and add smell to the senses your phone already stimulates. The plug-in accessory attaches to headphone socket on both iPhones and Android smartphones and, when told to by the companion app, releases a burst of fragrance, paired with a customizable LED light. It's ridiculous, but that's very much part of the Japan-made accessory's charm. The most important factor here is arguably the range of scents available, and Scentee hasn't held back. In no particular order, aromas include rose, mint, cinnamon roll, coffee, curry, jasmine, ylang-ylang, lavender, apple, coconut, strawberry and er, corn soup. And that's not all. They're joined by a special limited edition Korean BBQ collection that'll be available on November 15 and includes three extra 'flavors': two different type of meat and, well, baked potato. This bundle's particularly skewed towards Japanese customers, although we're already infatuated with some of the future scents currently being developed, like bacon and even more fruit smells. We've sniffed our way through several options during our time with the accessory -- the video (and more details) are right after the break.
Smell-O-Vision on your smartphone: Scentee sends smells instead of texts (video)
The dubious ability to send odors to your pals just became a distinct possibility thanks to the Scentee app and hardware from a company called ChatPerf. Seen in Japan, it works by letting you load a liquid refill into the device, which is then mixed and dispersed into the air at the command of an included app. The company noted a few of the myriad possible uses, like sending a smell to a friend who also has the device, perking up a yoga session, helping you wake up or making a shoot 'em up video game more lively with the odor of, say, gunpowder. It's still a prototype, but the company hopes to bring it to market with a variety of different odors, and launch it for iPhone or Android devices. Meanwhile, you can sniff it out in the video after the break.
