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Using technology to Capture a Smell.

CP/M User

CP/M User

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Back of Burke (Guday!), Australia
Okay well you all know we have made things that humans can 'See' & 'Hear', but I was wondering why nobody (well to my knowledge) hasn't built something which stores a smell and replay that smell anytime you need it. I was trying to think of where it could be used:

* In movies - think what a movie would be like if Smell was within the film - it would heighten the suspense of a smell perhaps - the smell of death for example!

* In Science - instead of trying to describe a smell in words a smell could be captured and generated when required. There could be a range of fields in Science where a smell might be of a considerable use.

There's probably other applications and I'm just kind of surprised it's a sense which hasn't become recognised as valuable!! I don't think Gene Roddenberry didn't even have this technology in Star Trek! ;-) (unless a Tricorder can do all that!) :-o
 
Well, there are a wide variety of things you'd likely not want to smell. I like watching Deadliest Catch and Dirty Jobs, probably rather not actually smell them.

Then the scientific issue, how to create a smell from scratch. It would have to have a certain moisture weight, and I'm still unclear what a smell really is (yes I've had time to think about that lol) but you'd have to add whatever molecule combination would be needed (unless there's a common pallete similar to colors (elements?) that can create most smells) and spray the appropriate amount of that for the viewing audience.

There was a virtual reality arcade that used to be in town for a probably under a year (was huge when it opened but honestly once you'd been there it wasn't that great and just pricey) but one was a leaning back chair/VR helmet experience. Essentially just an IMAX movie although I do recall you could look around as it played out. It had smells associated with it but was simple, and of course I was nervous when we went under water lol. Both my friend and I ended up doing the same thing and holding our breath for the smell injection part and just taking a small whiff (sp?) here and there instead of having some air freshener spray up our nose (it wasn't that direct but had us wondering). It was just the smell of pine when over the woods, the ocean was some perfumy smell that doesn't exist lol, and I don't remember the other two scenes.

So in my own overanalyzing of smells in the past and trying to determine what a smell really is (I guess it's partical matter from the source that's actually hitting your face/nose) but germs are too large to ride on it? Is my face touching the smell or water from the smell? (Even thinking clean like an air freshener, not just offending odors). You'd think there'd be something similar to a light spectrum that you could see a smell.
 
I guess it's something people haven't bridge the gap on in terms of all the nasty smells which are lurking out there. My theory was about creating a device which captures a smell without capturing all the nasty pathogens associated with that smell, so if you're subjected to rotten egg gas, the effect won't be the same as being subjected to actual rotten egg gas, though along those lines it would probably be centuries away from doing anything like that - which makes me wonder how far away we are? We can create perfume and have all these other nice smells - so manufacturers which produce products of that nature must have some idea. Anyway it's all thought about what headway we doing in terms of recreating smell as needed.
 
I would imagine you could use similar technology to a ink jet printer. Tiny amounts of several specially-formulated chemicals in liquid form are burnt in the required quantity and combination to produce a small volume of gas of a certain smell. Response time could be a fraction of a second if close enough to the nose.

There has been talk of computer-driven smells for movies, etc, in the last decade but I haven't heard of anything commercially available.

Or, the old fashioned way:
leather1.jpg
 
Sound and vision are easy, because you're dealing with light for vision, and sound waves for the audio.

In the case of light, you only need line of sight for the picture to get to you - it can be transmitted through air and also though various liquids, and the air (or liquids for that matter) can have particulate matter in it (in fact air does, that is what we 'smell', particulate matter in minute quantities).

The same story with audio, it's transferable through another medium such as air.

However, smell isn't as easily transferred, because it's not transferable like audio and visual things are, light waves and sound waves are independent of the source of them, however this is not the case for smells - when smelling something you are in fact consuming some of the particles that you are smelling via your nasal passages (think of that next time you smell a bad odour!), so unlike audio and visual transmission, you can't just create waves and get them to travel though the air, you have to actually make something to be consumed.

I hope I've made some sense, I'm sick and probably not explaining myself very clearly.
 
TroyW wrote:

However, smell isn't as easily transferred, because it's not transferable like audio and visual things are, light waves and sound waves are independent of the source of them, however this is not the case for smells - when smelling something you are in fact consuming some of the particles that you are smelling via your nasal passages (think of that next time you smell a bad odour!), so unlike audio and visual transmission, you can't just create waves and get them to travel though the air, you have to actually make something to be consumed.

This was the problem I wanted to discuss in that I thought if it -were- possible to extract the part required to have the smell and recreate that in a sense so it is more transferable. In Science it's perhaps not a problem so much have transferance - it's more about collecting a replica of the smell that it's as acturate as the original which would run more along the lines of Data Collecting with the need of Describing - which can be a pain in the neck sometimes! :-o

I hope I've made some sense, I'm sick and probably not explaining myself very clearly.

Hope you get well soon!
 
Yeah, I was thinking the similar inject principle and I guess the elemental table although I bet there's a condenssed requirement for a generic smell template.

I brought it up with a friend over pizza yesterday just saying how I still am unsure what a smell really is although I think it's physical particles from the source lighter than air that float to your face. Germs I recall are larger so you can't get sick from it despite a source of a smell having germs, viruses sometimes I think ARE small enough to float on the water molecules but I could be full of crap, I just recall that somewhere.

Anyway, in our little discussion we joked about a WWII documentary about mustard gas (smellovision kills the viewer), or the first nuclear warhead and a little puff and mini mushroom cloud from the smellovision device.

I think it's doable but you'd have to identify what is in each sampled smell. When you smell an orange, what chemicals/elements are in the molecules and in what density and I guess you could recreate a synthetic orange smell, pine, etc. I wonder if there are papers on creating scents. I mean we use animal musk in perfumes as well which is pretty foul smelling but we've figured out how to mix that with other chemicals to only add a small potency to our rugged sweet smelling cologne, etc.

Then the risk as we sorta stated would be the ability to mix two chemicals that have a dangerous combination.

Oooh.. although** like a VHS tape cartridge or something you could store predefined smells for just that movie, and then your player could read the cartridge to activate a bit of the smell from (light fan to breeze it to room) and I guess you could make individual instances of smellovision per show/game in a cartridge based world.
 
Smell-a-vision? Smell-a-graph?? Smell-a-type???

...Or, the ever-popular, Smell-a-phone (pull my finger, d00d)! Don't tell me you don't have friends like that...

--T
 
lol Druid. I wasn't implying an interactive scratch and sniff movie. The player would automatically expose the smell from the tape cartridge, no interactiveness although that is funny, and of course we're hypothesizing the theoretical.
 
It's already here, but nobody seems to want it:

http://digiscents.com/blog/

I believe there was an interface created by this company that produced scent everytime you visited perfume websites. But I honestly don't think people would want their computers stinking up their houses.
 
lmao.. maybe I'm on my own here but I don't think there are that many desirable smells missing from watching porn.

On an odd side topic, have you ever smelled something and then it reminds you of a game? I know it's kinda odd, but I bought a deoderant that I hadn't worn since right out of highschool. So I put it on knew it reminded me of a memory but wasn't sure what it was, then realized it was in my room at my parents, lights off playing Hardwar and listening to Orbital lol. I found another one that reminded me of GTA 1, I think I got rid of it eventually because it was too distracting to constantly think of the past.
 
It's funny the reason I started this topic was because I smelt something I couldn't describe - and yet it's the kind of smell I've known since I was a kid out in the environment. Yesterday strangely enough I smelt it again when I was digging up the earth whist planting. Difficult to say what this all means, though I'm guessing it's a smell which is discharged from plants, however it could simply be something decomposing from the moisture in the ground. I used to smell this smell around Creeks I believe and when I started this thread it was just after smelling it in the nearby creek. If it's plant based then it may not necessarily be from one plant - quite possibly it's an allelopathic effect to suppress other plants growing around those plants - though it's only a guess.
 
The smell I get from creeks is sort of from the rotting fall leaves, but I guess it's probably a partially sweet smell and possible a light mildew smell from the water droplets on the decomposing leaves.

But here in Texas it's rare to get that smell lol so when I was driving home one night near a creek that runs through Austin I smelled it and it took me back to so many memories of being a child. Was great although I always worry about how my driving was after snapping out of a flashback lol.
 
barythrin wrote:

The smell I get from creeks is sort of from the rotting fall leaves, but I guess it's probably a partially sweet smell and possible a light mildew smell from the water droplets on the decomposing leaves.

It's a remote possibility, unfortunately while I have smelt a similar smell at two sites near a creek, site 3 wasn't anywhere near a Creek! :-o Maybe perhaps it doesn't need to be a creek and there's enough moisture to allow something to decompose. The smell I've smelt though I felt wasn't sweet - perhaps more sour - might be dependant on what it is exactly which is decomposing. Entirely different plants maybe the result - or perhaps it depends on the plant family - or type (being Monocotyledon/Dicotyledon or Ferns and Allied Plants).

But here in Texas it's rare to get that smell lol so when I was driving home one night near a creek that runs through Austin I smelled it and it took me back to so many memories of being a child. Was great although I always worry about how my driving was after snapping out of a flashback lol.

No creeks in Texas are they in limited areas?
 
Yeah, it's a smell I'd get in the woods usually but there aren't many woods down here like there are up north. Here it's mostly shrubby ceder, not red oak or elm with larger leaves to fall on the ground.

There are creeks but they're usually dry, so in the unusual occassion that it rained for a few days it can give our parks the moisture in the leaves and ground and then will be more like northern areas I've lived in.
 
Druid6900 wrote:

Clean out your eavestroughs after a couple of days of rain. Should be about the same aroma :)

Actually I have done that, and didn't find the same smell at all. Probably because a lot of it was Eucalyptus which has it's own Aroma (the leafs are quite aromatic due to the glands on the leaf - which is specifically found in plants within the Myrtaceae family), so even when the an Eucalyptus leaf decomposes it's still has it's own Aroma!
 
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