Apathy Curve: Smell the Roses

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Friday, June 30, 2006

Smell the Roses

Engineers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology are developing a "smell recorder." It uses combinations of 96 chemicals to recreate complex scents. There are certainly many potential applications, but...

"It would be interesting to know just what range of smells this new system can detect and recreate," says Stephen Brewster, a computer scientist at the University of Glasgow, UK, who is studying whether smell can be used to help people quickly identify digital photos without opening them. "This could be an interesting delivery system for our work."

Help me out here, Steve. Why would I possibly need to identify a digital photograph by smell? Couldn't I just...well, look at the photo?

Oh, right. "Research grant." Gotcha.

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