We have invented devices to record what we can see, and devices to record what we can hear.
Why haven’t we invented something to record what we can smell?
How would this work if we did?
\[When I am travelling I really wish I could record the way things smell, because smell is so strongly evocative of memories and sensations.\]
In: Technology
Have you not played Leisure Suit Larry 7, Love for Sail?
It came with a Scratch and Sniff 2000 to smell the more… prominent rooms and… interactions.
I believe that someday we will be able to use AI or neural network to record and replay scents. Neural networks could learn which parts of the brain are activated by smells and then it could indirectly (without releasing the exact chemical) activate that part of the brain. Im not educated well enough to say that it is 100% possible but it seems feasible.
We *have*…
There are lots of devices that smell specific things like carbon monoxide, explosives, biological hazards and whatnot. There are also devices that can identify a wide range of chemicals.
The problem is not recording. The problem is *play back.*
Sound is really just vibrations in the air. Make something vibrate in the right pattern and you get the sound you want. Similarly every visible color can be produced by combining various amounts of red, green and blue light.
But each smell is a completely different chemical. The smell of coffee or vanilla can only be produced by coffee and vanilla. You can’t use “a bit of this and a bit of that” to fake it. So you would have to store some amount of countless chemicals inside the play back device. Each of these would need to be tracked and restocked like the worlds most annoying ink yet printer.
We can record smells I’m pretty sure. The issue is with reproducing the smell. You would have to synthesise all the chemicals that result in a particular smell and release them into your nose.
The more likely scenario is we find a way to reproduce a smell by interacting with the brain itself.
It’s a bit like trying to recreate a feeling of touching a specific material e.g. satin. You’d need a piece of satin to recreate it or you somehow activate parts of the brain to recreate that feeling.
Question to supplement OP’s question.
Would it be possible to invent a device that can record the chemicals in the air that we smell and give a breakdown of it — in order to replicate the smell? I.e. hold the device in the air after someone sprayed perfume and it details what chemicals it picks up and the ratios… i.e. neroli 50%, sandlewood 30% and so on. Or was that the actual question?
Audio can be recorded by the changes of atmospheric pressure caused by acoustic sound moving around the microphone diaphragm. As for Video, we all know devices use light intensity to map a picture, and a series of those pictures makes video. But speaking about smell, it’s a bit complicated. You need to recreate the chemistry of certain gases to feel the smell. So the medium and space you live in needs to be occupied by some gases and some machine has to do it. But, the smell-creating thing is so vast in terms of space and uses so many living and non-living things, atmosphere, etc, etc, which are surrounding you to create that sense of smell. To simulate that is very very hard. One jasmine smell, one rose smell, these things we can recreate but not an abstract smell that occurred somewhere in the world. It’s just so hard as the smell itself is a result of many many things that are happening around you.
Food for thought – Have you asked the same question about the sense of touch? How it feels to touch something. Applies the same for smell.
Well, we can maufacture the volatile chemicals responsable for smell. so, its just a matter of blending these in the right proportions to recreate a smell experience.
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