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Why _can't_ we record smells?
Or touch?
I was outside briefly to put things in the shed, and was all "I want to take a picture of the smells!"
After a pause, I was bemused to realize that no, I cannot photograph the smell of our lilacs in bloom. Nor the feel of things.
Why not?!
I was outside briefly to put things in the shed, and was all "I want to take a picture of the smells!"
After a pause, I was bemused to realize that no, I cannot photograph the smell of our lilacs in bloom. Nor the feel of things.
Why not?!
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Actualy we do have primitive smell books. Do you remember scratch and sniff books from when you were small:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/?category_id=815250
And my nephew who is 16 months old has a touch book that has fluffy, rough, smooth.
I think they are learning how to transmit smells. They're learning what makes up smells and tastes and I remember amusement-value technology from decades ago.
I remember a Freekazoid episode on smell-o-vision
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell-O-Vision
Sometimes I take things from a place to remember it (fragrant bark for example)
no subject
I suspect, at some point in the future, it will be possible to take a sample of a smell, analize and save it, and then find the chemistry to recreate it.
It would be done much the way they make color samples now when you go to the hardware store. You hand the person a color. They scan it. The machine does the chemistry to recreate it. Tah Dah, you go home with paint that matches the drapes.
Would it destroy or explode the perfume industry? Makes me wonder.
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The air pressure changes are measured at one or two points (microphones) and just one value is recorded at a time: motion of a plate caused by the air pressure change. This works because humans (approximately) measure the air pressure at two locations, and then do a lot of math to decipher it. Playback is the inverse process of recording: take the magnetic/space signal, turn it into electrical/time signal, and then drive a microphone in reverse (a speaker).
When you record a visual scene, you are using a 2-dimensional array of individual samplers, each recording one value: how many photons hit me? (That gets you black and white; color involves tripling the number of sensors and putting a red, blue or green filter over each one.) Then the values get recorded, transformed, stored. Playback is the inverse, where you generate red/blue/green dots in close proximity to each other.
Humans have about 400 smell receptor types ( http://www.nature.com/news/human-nose-can-detect-1-trillion-odours-1.14904 ) so we would need to invent sensors that can measure the relative concentration of about 400 chemicals in air, then record that and figure out an inverse process to generate those 400 chemicals in the quantities required. I expect you can leave a few of them off, but probably not many. I also suspect that the signal bandwidth is not too horrendous: 400 channels of, say, 24 bit samples, at somewhere between 1 and 10 Hz. 96000 bits/second is a trivial workload these days.
So all we need to invent are the sensors and the generators. Somebody's probably working on it now.
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And we do *duplicate* scents, or try to, but just not from a glance/sniff and a capture. It takes chemistry. We will probably speed the process over time.
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