We can transmit light and sound over distance (TV, internet, radio, etc.), so why not do the same with smell?
I’m picturing a device attached to your monitor, your TV, or in the ceiling above movie-goers’ heads. Call it the Smell-O-Box: it contains, say, a few milligrams each of several dozen common chemical compounds. The transmitter sends an electronic signal to the box to mix up a few nanograms of #7, #11, and #81, to recreate the smell of, say, fresh-cut grass. Another signal mixes up #9, #23, and #72 to recreate the smell of, say, burning race fuel.
The commercial applications are staggering. Manufacturers of laundry detergent can just transmit the smell to my TV, and I can decide whether or not I like it based on the smell (rather than cute mascots). A YouTuber walking through a German Christkindmarkt can transmit the smells of baking gingerbread, of Gluhwein, and peppermint. A movie theater can emit the smells of, say, the New York subway for a scene that takes place there.
Clearly there’s a flaw in my plan, else someone would have patented it by now.
Distributing scratch and sniff cards, for a tried-and-true old-school method.
Since all you can transmit over the internet is digital information, you’d have to have the smells or their components already on hand, to be released on receiving the right signal. I imagine something like a keyboard with various odors released when a key is pressed, but “played” by someone at a distance over the internet.
Like with visual information. The pixels and all their various color and brightness combinations already exist in your monitor, they just get turned on and off based on information sent from elsewhere over the internet.
I’d like to see something like the “Odorifics” from Harold and Maude. Smell-based art in its own right.
One issue I see isn’t with the technology, but with the refilling. Sight and sound don’t use up anything. I don’t have to buy a light refill. But anything that takes an additional component, will require a refill. Are you, as the consumer, going to spent time or money to replace the raw materials, so that Starbucks can transmit the smell of coffee to you? It would be like allowing websites to print anything they want on my printer. Now I have to refill the ink on the darn thing.
The second issue is pervasiveness. The Starbucks commercial is followed by one for laundry detergent, followed by a flowery perfume. What does your living room smell like now? Sight and sound fade quickly. I wouldn’t want all of those lingering scents in my house.
Years ago there was an April Fools joke article about a system for encoding odours in web pages (I think). It talked about sending odours as coded intensities of 137 distinct basic smell compounds. The reproduction equipment was called a ‘reeker’.
The OP understands this, as evidenced by the text in the post. He is asking about triggering the release of scents remotely based on some signal. This is exactly what Smell-o-Vision did in 1960; the scents were triggered by the movie soundtrack. That link describes some of the technical difficulties, including the time it took for the scent to reach every part of the theater, and balancing the concentration so everyone could smell it but weren’t overwhelmed.
Tastes of Chocolate describes other reasons why it probably isn’t commercially viable. oNotes that you linked to evidently has some market, but I can’t imagine they are flying off the shelf. $100 initially plus ~$20 every month for new scent discs is a steep price for what’s essentially a glorified Glade Plug-In.
I’m asking myself: does anybody WANT this? I surely wouldn’t want my TV or laptop to stink up my room permanently with an avalanche of smells every ad/movie scene/whatever triggers. Sounds like a nightmare to me, but then maybe I just have a sensitive nose.
For a personal device, as long as any scent emitter depends on refills of chemicals in some form or another those refills are going to have to be available at very low cost to gain a grip on the market for people who would want this in the first place, which may be a fairly small group. It’s possible to be done, a little disk something like scratch and sniff cards can be produced very inexpensively. They been inserted into magazines for advertising for years, going back to the days where magazines had much wider circulation. It’s just the size of the market that is questionable.
For larger scale commercial this could be done. Stores, restaurants, offices, anyplace that cares enough about the olfactory environment could do this. The costs may not be any greater than a company supplied coffee machine. But without proof that scents can improve productivity the way caffeine does that will be a hard sell.
Of course, we do already have the 3D printer, which can be used to send the smell of burning plastic.
No, we can’t really do this because the sense of smell is mediated chemically, by molecules. TV, internet, radio are all based on electrical or electromagnetic signals, which can’t chemicals.
What we can do is transmit a signal that commands a device “release chemical XYZ”. So that means on the receiving end, there must be a device that already contains the chemicals. Sort of a “smell printer”, as it were.
I hate my inkjet printer, and it only takes 5 cartridges. Imagine some crazy device that held 64 or 128 cartridges. Huge maintenance hassle, and the “scent designer” would always be complaining that it lacks the exact scent they need, even if it had 1024 scents. But I do think it would be fun to see how people might improvise with a limited palette, maybe using some visual/audio misdirection.
Another potential problem would be hacking / viruses
that turn any smell into …
well… just imagine a public bathroom at a train station somewhere in ,say, India
