This App Can Send Scented Text Messages

For foodies desperate to make their food porn as realistic as possible, a new app could finally attach what's missing from all those pictures of gourmet meals: smell.

Harvard University professor David Edwards, along with a team of students, created an iPhone app called oSnap that can take photos and send accompanying scents to the recipient. The app premiered June 17 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York with a scented message sent from Paris to New York.

The app has an Instagram-like automatic camera with which the user can snap photos of the object they wish to send. After the photo is taken, a tagging menu appears with a selection of scent notes for the user to choose from, such as butter, cocoa beans, baguette or red wine. Up to eight different scents can be combined to give the recipient the full picture of a meal or other experience. The photo and its corresponding scent tags are then messaged to the recipient, who uses a scent-transmitting machine called an oPhone to "receive" the smell.

Currently, the oPhone is only available at the Museum of Natural History and at Le Laboratoire in Paris. Users who send an oSnap from their iPhone can travel to the two locations and download the message — called an oNote — along with the scent. But Edwards and his team are raising support via an Indiegogo campaign to mass-produce the oPhone for home use. The sticker price of an oPhone is $199. Since the site launched Monday, 27 contributors have pledged nearly $7,000, a small dent in the $150,000 goal.

The team envisions the device becoming commonplace in restaurants, coffee shops and other places where explaining complex smells and flavors can be difficult. Edwards suggested that baristas could use the oPhone to give customers a sense of a product before buying.

The invention evokes memories of Smell-O-Vision, an ill-received effort to add smells into the movie-watching experience. Edwards was quick to point out that while Smell-O-Vision and its subsequent attempts doused the room with an overwhelming scent, the oPhone keeps the odors contained to the individual's nose.

"[The oPhone] produces just enough aroma that it's your message, not your neighbor's message," he said. "It's enough for a signal but it's not anything more than that."

The Museum of Natural History will be displaying the oPhone in an interactive exhibit in the Sackler Educational Laboratory for Comparative Genomics and Human Origins. Part of the appeal in curating the device was in its demonstrating the connection between primitive and modern humans.

"The museum is very interested in the evolution of life and scent is a big part of that," said Michael Novacek, the museum's senior vice president. "In a sense, our whole legacy really comes from the olfactory system."

Posted by : Gizmeon