Long-lasting smell-o-vision may finally be a reality, thanks to Japanese ‘solid scent’ startup The continued push toward higher resolution screens is a treat for your eyes, but what of your poor nose? It’s left out of the experience on the screen, and that’s a shame. Scent can be a powerful stimulator of memory and emotion. That’s why we’ve been flirting with the idea of smell-o-vision on and off for decades. It’s never quite worked well enough to take its place in your living room, but maybe the Japanese startup Aromajoin will finally be the one to make your TV smelly. This company has invented solid scent cartridges that can blast aromas at you much more economically than previous attempts. The Aromajoin system is the brainchild of South Korean engineer Dong Wook Kim who spent several years prototyping and testing what he calls the “Aroma Shooter.” That’s the business end of Aromajoin’s take on smell-o-vision. They’re basically little compressors that can expel a stream of scent molecules in a narrow band about 60-80 cm (2.0-2.6 feet) away. That part isn’t anything new — there are plenty of prototype systems that can puff smells at you, but they all rely on some sort of inconvenient liquid reservoir to do it. No one wants to refill vials of smelly oils or gels in their TV. Then you have to worry about evaporation and keeping the system clean so it can vacuum up the oils to aerosolize and blow at you. See? Sounds awful. That’s why the solid cartridges employed by Aromajoin’s Aroma Shooter could finally work as more than a novelty. The carts created by Kim can provide three second bursts of aroma more than 45,000 times each. You could therefore trigger a single cartridge 250 times per day and it would still last six months. The current Aroma Shooter prototype contains six aroma cartridges, each comprising a different assortment of scents. The device can swap between multiple scents in just 0.1 seconds, allowing it to mist odors in your direction without an abrupt change from one to the next. Replacing a cartridge in the Aroma Shooter will cost about $60, which when you figure in how much use you get out of it, is probably a better deal than printer ink cartridges. The current prototype Aroma Shooter is on the pricey end, though. Aromajoin is asking $2,250 for the unit, but this is still the early days, and it’s not a consumer product just yet. The team is working on a second version of the Aroma Shooter dubbed AS1S, as well as a smaller mini shooter that could debut on Kickstarter next year. As for what makes the scent cartridges work, it’s actually a big secret. Kim is in the process or securing a patent on the technology, but until then he’s playing it very close to the chest. He’s pulling a Batman by ordering the parts from suppliers all over the world so no one can put together a full list of everything needed to copy the Aroma Shooter. He then hand assembles the cartridges himself. That probably figures into the high price tag, but hopefully this level of secrecy won’t be necessary forever. Kim envisions a future when the smelltrack of TV and films is as important as the visuals and sound. TVs and theaters are the first targets, but in time even the phone in your pocket could become more fragrant.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 05:40:29 +0000
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