The ‘scratch and sniff’ of the 21st century makes cyber scents

Imagine smelling the scent of a loved one 10,000 kilometres away or getting a whiff of gunsmoke after Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry VI blows away yet another street punk.

Stuff of the future? Not any-more.

Three academics in the US – Firooz Rasouli, Hamid Arastoopour, and Ali Oskouie – have invented the aroma drive which allows the user to smell through cyberspace for the first time.

"The technology works with the prototype unit using small capillary tubes fabricated from special semi-porous polymers (plastic) with tiny electrical wires in each tube.

"Each tube encases a scented material such as a brand of perfume or a wine sample. When the computer user clicks on an icon related to a perfume, its corresponding wire is heated. Perfume molecules become excited and escape through the pores in the polymer, and the fan blows the aroma out of the device," explains Rasouli.

When it is commercially available, the computer user would insert a disk, like an ordinary CD-ROM into a special drive connected to a personal computer.

The aroma molecules would be adsorbed into concentric polymer rings placed on a circular disk.

As soon as a user clicks on an aroma-linked icon, electronic signals would direct a laser toward the corresponding aroma ring.

In principle it works similar to the scratch and sniff cards that are found in glossy magazines. Some are even calling it the scratch and sniff of the 21st century.

Naturally the applications for this technology could be endless, however in the first phase of development the disk will hold only a limited selection of pre-mixed aromas.

In the second phase of their programme the inventors plan to develop an alphabet of smells. Smells would be mixed to make up certain combinations, similar to how an artist mixes new colours on a palate. But how does it match up to the real thing?

According to Rasouli pretty well.

"Our tests with various aromas including several samples of perfumes, scented oils and flower extracts have shown an excellent match up between the stored aroma and the original sample."

But as the human olfactory sense is extremely complex Rasouli does believe that it might be difficult to match certain scents. In the near future the aroma drive could also find use in the video game industry and beyond.

A downside of the technology some have suggested could be the rise of stink bomb e-mail but for the immediate future Rasouli believes that this would not be a reality as the subject smell would have to exist on the disk.

Currently the three inventors are attempting to make the aroma drive commercially viable.