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Will your phone one day let you smell as well as see and hear what’s on the other end of a call?
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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This will never happen. Smell-o-Vision and its successors have been in development for decades, and they all have the same issue: where to store the numerous scent liquids. You can't just digitize scent and generate it on demand with some kind of solid state device. You can't just combine three liquids to make 1000 scents—the article's analogy of combining light to make colors is overly optimistic, bordering on delusional.
The other two related problems are convenience and cost. This is 1000% a novelty, and novelties quickly lose their appeal after you experience it the first time. Who is seriously going to be going out to buy replacement cartridges for a thing that is essentially a toy?
Exactly. I think it's much more likely that we'll get a way to "feel" things remotely than smell them. If we ever do anything with scent, it'll probably require bypassing the nose and going straight for the brain, and I highly doubt we're anywhere near capable of doing that.
Neuralink test subject: Why do I smell burnt toast?
Sorry, we had the settings misconfigured and "mildly" scorched your hippocampus.
Ok, but why do I smell hippos??
To at least some extent we’ve already got the remote feeling thing with haptic suits, though they’re still rather pricey for most at the moment. Also not sure how great their functionality is since I’ve never tried any myself.
Yeah, I've heard good things about haptic gloves, but I also heard people claim that haptic feedback on phones feels like actually pressing buttons, and that's absolutely not true. But I do think it's a far more premising area of research, because touch is just electrical signals at the end of the day.
At most I could see it being a kind of novelty for stuff like movie theaters to add to the immersion. And the obvious ads bullshit.
Through let's be frank: movie theaters want you to smell popcorn, so you buy snacks. Smell-o-Vision would have to be more lucrative than a $15 bucket of popcorn.