Virtual Perfume

While chatting with a friend, I got this term that made my imagination run wild.

I searched for "virtual perfume" and got a few interesting links like this one about Calvin Klein launching a virtual perfume on Second Life. While what CK did is just a smart marketing action to promote their brand and their new perfume, Second Life is quite a nice application, but I'd rather not start using it. It might turn out addictive and then I might find myself into the Matrix, disconnecting only to go to the toilet :-D

My imagination went further then just marketing material to distribute on the web, I actually thought of the media of the future. The techniques of recording and reproduction of visual and auditory information are nowadays well established, maybe it's time to move forward and put some more time into researching how to record and reproduce information to serve the other human senses.

What about having this artificial nose to sniff you and transmit the data over the internet to a device installed on your friend's machine that takes this data and makes up the exact smell? Does this sound like something belonging to the far future? I honestly think not. There are so many sensors that detect all kind of smells, mostly designed for safety, like those to sniff gas, food turned bad or illegal substances (there's such a device at the entry to the Statue of Liberty, at security check). Look there's even something simpler here. This is just small patch that displays special visual patterns according to the smell in the air. Of course it has only a few smells that it recognises.

The sniffer should detect all the simple chemical substance and their amount in the composition of the air at any given time and the reproducer should have stores (just like printers have cartridges) of many chemical substances to combine them in the exact amount specified by the sniffer in order to produce the same odor.

I see a few problems here, the speed and the accuracy of sniffing every small change in the air's chemical composition, the speed and the accuracy of reproducing the small changes at the other end must be as high as possible. I'm sure these will be solved by future technologies. Another problem will arise when the accuracy is very good, the fragrance creators will lose their market as people will be able to recreate their smell in their own homes...

Every ingenious idea that you get, after breaking it into smaller parts and realizing that it's so simple, you realise it's impossible to be the only one to come up with it. So of course, I'm not the first, bummer, I was about to request a patent for it... Here's a very nice explanation of the idea, the tests they ran and their results.

Nokia's idea is also very interesting, I think in a few years we'll use these kind of technologies. I'm so looking forward to it. Imagine including in your profile on myspace or facebook your smell, how cool would that be?