I am a film person. I love, love LOVE the experience of watching a film. This experience is a sensory immersion of sorts, visually and auditorily, that helps me feel like I am in another place and/or time.
But a big key mental identifier of place and time for me is also the scent of a place. For years I have been dreaming of a “smelltrack” for movies that could release various pre-“recorded” scents at certain points in the film on queue.
Is this scientifically possible? Why or why not?
IIRC, smell seems to be a result of a sensitive compilation of a relatively small number (small as in not an individual receptor for every single smell but still possibly in the dozens or hundreds) of receptor types. Presumably if you could crack the code for how these receptors are activated by different smells and produce this smell from a compilation of chemicals, sure, it’s possible.
Unfortunately, we still seem to be far, far off.
If you have access to The Economist online, there was an article on all of this in their last Technology Quarterly.
Well, smell is essentially just the act of detecting trace amounts of the object in the air. It’s more complicated in that some products also have reactions going on which produce totally new chemicals, but the point remains that in order to replicate smells you’d have to have a way of aresolizing tiny bits of the smells you want to recreate.
That’s conceptually feasible so long as you’re working with a defined set of items.
In order to recreate it artificially, you’d basically have to invent the Star Trek food replicator which would theoritically amount to conjuring a nearly infinite variety of molecules from their basic elements. That falls into the realm of nearly impossible.
All possible colors can be made from just three primary colors.
Smells don’t work that way. You’d need the physical resources of the specific chemicals required, plus a means of preparation and delivery.
In addition, smells have a physical component; light and sound do not. Smells will linger, to a degree, and will result in cumulative residue. The theater would have to be hosed down from time to time.
Altogether impractical. Unless you can find a way to affect an audience member’s brain, directly, without the need for real-world artifacts. That seems the likeliest possibility. Although having each moviegoer jack themselves into the smell-system through a port set into the base of their skull is probably a long way off.
I don’t understand the distinction. Are you saying you’d have to “gather” the smells from something that produces them naturally? (which also happens to be something I was wondering about) How would you go about this?
It’s been tried…
Back in the early 80s a few theaters sampled it.
You see, basically, there were “film makers” in the movies who combined aroma-therapy with cinema, and it failed.
That’s not to say it doesn’t have future, but to the average consumer, at this point, it’s “gimmicky”.
From here:
Assuming no gene rearrangement or alternate splicing, we’ve got up to 4-500 smells to include in our, “palate.” Not exactly the three colors we use in computer screens to generate 32,000,000 colors, but not to the realm of impossiblity. We’re going to need some sort of nano-technology to release these chemicals in controlled amounts.
I think the hard part is going to be finding specific chemicals with high specificity for certain receptors so that you aren’t getting a bunch of cross activation and making things needlessly complex.
Also, you’re going to need an artificial nose that can create accurate smell recordings in the first place.
Well, it seems to me that hosing down the theater from time to time would be more practical than jacking people’s brains into a machine a la The Matrix.
As for the physical resources being prepared and delivered, it would just have to be another thing the distributors produce and send out with the reels. This also starts to verge on the business side of the feasibility of this idea, but while that is a legitimate concern as well of course, I would like to first answer the question of the scientific possibility, if we can keep the discussion toward that end.
Wired had an article a few years back, on an US company that was working on a small box which could be connected to your PC, and through a number of “primary” smells when mixed produce a very wide number of smells.
Well the article said they had a final product any-day-now. And that’s five years or so back, so I don’t know what became of it.
I think the biggest problem would be the delivery. Without plugging directly into the brain’s olfactory lobe, you’re left wearing some sort of headset (or nose-set, if you will) that is pumping scented air into your nostrils. But it isn’t like sound, you can’t just turn it on and off. There’s the problem of bringing in the right concentration of scent at the right time and then clearing it when no longer needed. I don’t know if this would work.
I seem to remember that one film would give you a card with several scratch and sniffs that one would use when signaled by some icon in the screen.
You’re probably thinking of John Waters’ Polyester, which was touted as being filmed in Smell-O-Vision
“Smell-o-vision Replaces Television!”
It’s been tried before, but the issues were the complexity of the equipment, plus the problem of synchronizind the smell with the movie. It wouldn’t do if the scene set in a peaceful valley filled with wild flowers still has the lingering odor of the decomposing body from the previous scene.
The scratch 'n sniff in Polyester was nothing more than a gimmick. The cards cost money and, like 3D glasses, it’s hard for the theater to get them all back after the show. Why cut into your profits that way?