It seems like any color or sound can be accurately encoded (and recreated) with just a few numbers. Yet that doesn’t seem to be the case with smell or flavor. You can take a photo or sound recording and it’ll be a faithful recreation, but there’s no way to do that with smells or flavors. Is it a technology limitation or is there something fundamental to them that makes it harder to encode?
In: Physics
We actually kind of can, but we run into big problems elsewhere.
First is the delivery method. Light is easy to produce in different colors using electricity, which is pretty cheap per-pixel. Smell and taste on the other hand would require bottles of chemicals that would be costly and need to be replaced constantly. Taste would require a device physically pressed to your tongue which would be gross, and smell would either have to go directly up your nose, or release the scents into the room which would make it impossible to switch between different smells at the rate which a movie or game would require.
Then you have the production side. Movies/games/music would need to hire people and have setups similar to video editing and audio mixing where they would actually design the smells for each scene, but then there would need to be a universal standard (like .mp3, DVD, etc.) that supports these sensory devices in order to actually release it to consumers.
All of that for something most people really don’t care too much about. Honestly, how often do you watch a movie and think “Wow, I would love to smell The Hulk right now,” or “Damn, I wish I knew what that monster tasted like?”
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