Smell-o-vision

So far the media and electronics industries have mastered the home theater. We have the opportunity to watch movies and television series at High Definition quality and sound in Dolby Digital quality. Unfortunately our home entertainment setup still don have so called smell-o-vision. Think about the moment when you’re watching a documentary about wild life. The full experience would be if you can smell the distant lands while sitting comfortably in your sofa and watching it. Thanks to the Japanese team of researchers, we might soon be able to watch TV and get an extra perception of the subject we are currently watching with activation of the sense of smell.

Smell-o-vision isn’t something new. The idea of smell-o-vision has been on the tech industry’s radar for what seems like forever now, and made its first widespread appearance over 50 years ago in a conveniently titled 1960 film Scent of Mystery. However, there are documented cases of scents being used in conjunction with theater dating back to over 100 years ago. Cotton was soaked in rose oil, and then placed in front of a fan in order to waft the scent around. A bit of cotton soaked in one specific oil isn’t dynamic, though, and can’t change scents based on what is happening on-screen. Fortunately, this isn’t difficult to overcome. A typical smell-o-vision machine is essentially a box of various scented oils with some kind of spreading mechanism, like a fan. The box receives a signal from, for example, a video game, which tells the box to release an ocean scent. Like a box of crayons, if you don’t have the exact color you want, you can just mix some of the ones that are available. So, if single ocean-scented oil isn’t available, other oils would mix to create something close to that desired ocean scent.

The Japanese scientist developed olfactory display system that can generate an odor distribution on a two-dimensional display screen. The proposed system has four fans on the four corners on the screen. The airflows that are generated by these fans collide multiple times and create an airflow that is directed towards the user from a certain position on the screen. By introducing an odor vapor in the airflows, the odor distribution is as if an odor source had been placed onto the screen. Because of the four fans the airflow can be adjusted to a certain point on the screen which means that the odor source can be shifted to an arbitrary position on the screen by adjusting the balance of the airflows from the four fans. The airflow velocity can even be set below the threshold for airflow sensation, such that the odor alon is perceived by the user.

The main issue with smell-o-vision machines is that it can become very expensive to have to continually replace the scented oils, and also that it requires a fair bit of extra coding in order for the game or movie to tell the machine when to release the appropriate oils. A team of Japanese researchers haven’t tackled these issues yet, but they have created a smell-o-vision system that not only releases scents through the actual TV or monitor, but can pinpoint exactly where the smelly object is on-screen, and make the scents seem like they’re coming from those very pixels. (See: Vector vengeance: British researchers claim they can kill the pixel within five years

Created by Haruka Matsukura and a team of colleagues at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, the display is called the “smelling screen,” and dispenses with the need for an extra box full of oil. As New Scientist points out, the display is a standard LCD, but has an air stream in each corner of the screen. From those screen corners, gel pellets are vaporized and sent into the air streams, which are then sent out to the specific portions of the screen via fans. The power and direction of the fans are efficient enough to send, for example, the smell of fried chicken to the drumstick displayed at the bottom of the screen. Currently, the smell-o-system can only produce one scent at a time, but the team aims to create interchangeable cartridges so you can easily swap out which smells you want your display to produce.

I hope that the smell-o-vision will soon be available to an average user, because it will give you the ability to experience TV in whole new different way. Thank you for reading please comment.