Move over email and say sayonara to text messages. Why waste your time with an archaic and exhausting thing like typing when you can soon be conveying messages that transcend mere sight and sound and instead use our as-yet-untapped sense of smell?
Yes, you read that correctly. Smell.
It seems a Dr. David Edwards, biomedical engineer at Harvard and founder of Paris-based Le Laboratoire, has come up with what he's calling the "oPhone." Set for a beta launch in July, the hand-held device lets users combine aromas and send the result as a message to friends. Thanks to partnerships with perfumers and baristas, Edward's smell messaging system can currently deliver about 356 different combinations of aromas and the company hopes to have thousands when the device officially launches to the public at large.
My initial reaction, after making sure I wasn't on a fake news site, to this emerging technology was confusion (Smell texts? Really??), derision (That's just freakin' stupid.) and yes, just a bit of intrigue (I wonder if I could text a fart to someone?).
But it seems I'm not the only person intrigued by digitally messaged smells.
Already on the market is the Scentee plug-in that attaches to your smart phone so you can receive "smell notifications" when you get a message or text. Right now the device can only emit one smell, but advances in the tech could mean that one day you'll likely hear a conversation along the lines of:
"Why do I suddenly smell boiled cabbage and Old Spice?"
"Oh, I just got a message from my Uncle Tobias that's his assigned smell notification."
Even NASA is working on a piece of technology that can detect chemicals in the air and analyze them digitally. Eventually, it could transform smells into digital signals that could then be sent to someone with an app and phone add-on that interprets the signals and recreates the same smell.
So halleluiah and saints be praised! Yes -not today, mind you - but sometime in the near future, I will be able to email or text a fart to someone. Yeah, like you weren't thinking the same thing.
Folks with more highbrow ideas say the ultimate goal is to merge this tech with advances in other digital sensory reproduction fields to build one multi-sensory device that unifies all five senses to create an immersive virtual reality.
Many think we'll get there in about five years, so until then I guess I'll smell ya later.
