Thursday 6 November 2008

Tokyo's Odor Recorder Smell O Vision Device

The Tokyo Institute of technology have developed a device that has the ability of determining the qualitative and quantitative composition of the target smell to record any smell and play it back later, or even send it over the Internet! Smell O Vision, online shopping and even remote diagnosis will be advanced through the ability of recreating smells.

Pambuk Somboon says: "In video, you just need to record shades of red, green and blue,But humans have 347 olfactory sensors, so we need a lot of source chemicals."

The device, which was the first of its kind uses an array of quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) sensors to first create an odor recipe and then can either store the information or use it to re-create the smell from an ingredient list of about 96 chemicals. Unlike machines such as the Scent Dome from Trisenx, this device is able to replicate smells and has the capacity to deliver a wider array of smells, and i would suspect an online catalogue of smells is on the way.

This is a giant leap forward! Online retailers now have the ability to replicate the smell of any item, imagine how use full this would be for a leading range of skincare items, you can even replicate designer perfumes and stream them over the Internet! Doctors can diagnose patients from across the world by smelling the bile, urine and blood of a patient. This technology is admittedly still in its early phases however the smells of orange, lemon, banana and many more have already been replicated, the device is even advanced enough to tell the difference between a red apple and a green apple.

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