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
Colors can’t actually be quantified with RGB. The RGB gamut does not cover all possible colors that are visible to humans. In fact, most colors that are purely a specific wavelength, do not have a RGB representation (since any color that corresponds to a wavelength needs that specific wavelength, rather than a combination of other wavelengths).
Also some music snobs understand the limitation of recording sound compared to experiencing the sound played live. I don’t, so I’m not gonna comment further on that.
An important aspect here is that flavour isn’t a real sense – it’s a composite experience.
Taste is what is picked up by taste buds, but taste is very boring – just a handful of simple tastes like sweet and savoury. Flavor is also largely defined by the smell of the food – even when it’s in your mouth it’s interacting with your sense of smell. That’s why plugging your nose can mute the sense of flavour.
The total experience of eating a food also relies a lot on texture (basically the sense of touch within the mouth), the temperature of the food, and some extra flares like spiciness or mintiness (which comes from chemicals that cause certain pain receptors to register your body as burning or freezing at normal body temperature) or even agitation (like horseradish which isn’t actually spicy, rather it releases a vapour that agitates mucus membranes).
A recipe is basically the same a .jpeg, though, in the sense that both a recipe and a jpeg tell you how to manipulate ingredients in the case of a recipe, and any light-emitting screen in the case of a jpeg, to replicate a previous sensory experience.
A recipe is generally imperfect, sure, but in theory if someone were sufficiently precise in a recipe (Ex: instead of calling for 1 potato, call for a precise mL measurement of a particular breed of potato grown in a specifically prescribed way that’s kept within specific temperature ranges) and someone sufficiently careful at following that recipe you could reproduce flavours reliably.
It’s just impractical.
Light and Sound are both possible to represent, manipulate, and synthesize using electronic computers. Smell and Taste work differently and are much much harder to do the same with.
Light and Sound can both be modeled as waves. Light is an electromagnetic wave, and Sound is an acoustic/compression wave. Waves are very convenient to work with for computers because the mathematical representation of a wave is readily computable with the same sorts of computation methods that electronic computers are already doing. It’s very easy to output an electronic wave as Light or Sound.
Light is done by translating the waveform into a sequence of instructions that controls the switching on/off of light emitting pixels on a monitor. Sound is done by translating the waveform into an electrical pulse that is analog to the acoustic pulse, and the speakers connected to the computer will convert the electrical wave into an acoustic wave that you can hear.
Smell and Taste are not able to be modeled as waves. The underlying phenomena here is based on chemical receptors in the nose and mouth, and these can only be stimulated by the presence of the appropriate chemicals. We can model the molecular structure of these chemicals, but we have no output devices that can synthesize them on the spot. There’s no known way to do this right now. The underlying physics is just not something that we’ve yet learned how to model electronically or synthesize with output devices.
I’ve also had this thought, remember when they said in the future we could smell and taste ads on television. Maybe it can be done.
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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