We are able to capture moving images and sound. Why can’t we capture smells and broadcast them through a television or phone for example?
In: 3
We probably can, but you’d need dispersers, which means they’d need to be refilled, or purchased anew. Also, it would stink up your room, and it’s rarely worth it, pleasant smells aren’t really a common theme in movies
Smells are made up of molecules and you can’t create these out nothing. Hypothetically you could invent a machine that disperses smells on triggers in a movie but you’d need buy, like, cartridges filled with smells which you can replace when necessary and that’s more hassle than it’s worth, so no one has done this yet other than a few theaters for selected screenings.
scratch and sniff was a thing for a bit. with the pace of VR developments… errr.. who knows what will come xD
To transmit something, you have to break it down into its most basic, interchangeable blocks.
For colour, this is easy-ish.
Well it’s actually not possible to transmit a colour over TV.
You may think that we transmit colours over TV all the time, but that’s only because you’re human.
If you were something else, the colours on TV would look all wrong.
It so happens that most human eyes have 3 sensors in their eyes to detect colour, and every colour that a human sees is just varying degrees of those 3 sensors (which we label “red”, “green” and “blue”).
So if we want to transmit a colour over the TV or the phone, and we want a human to see it on the other end, then all we have to do is figure out what intensities of red, green and blue it is, and we transmit those 3 values.
What about pictures?
Well, we can’t really transmit pictures accurately, either.
But, if we’re assuming that a human is going to be watching it, then again, we can make some simplifications.
We figure out how good the human eye is at seeing details.
Then we break an image up into a grid of colours, and transmit each part of the grid one-by-one.
It’s not perfect, but it fools human eyes, so good enough.
What about *moving* images?
Well, you get the idea.
We can’t do that, either, but we can do it well enough to fool human eyes if we figure out how quickly humans need to see something before they believe it’s moving.
And so it goes.
Which brings us to smell.
There are a few problems with smell.
Problem #1: There are a *lot* of smells.
Remember how human eyes only see colours made up of 3 different parts?
Well human noses smell smells made up about 350 different parts.
How they combine together, what intensities to use, etc., is more complex and not as well understood as with colours.
Problem #2: Smells are hard to reproduce.
Ever smelled some incense or perfume or something that was supposed to smell like strawberries?
It *kind* of does.
With images and sounds, we were pretty lucky in that we quickly found electronic ways to reproduce them semi-accurately.
With smells, we’re having a harder go of it.
Smells aren’t just energy or information: they’re *molecules*.
And if you want to simulate a molecule, you have to build it.
For some smells, we can kind of do it, but for other smells, the molecules are very difficult to manufacture (especially on-demand) and may be very expensive.
Problem #3: Nobody actually wants it.
Even if problems #1 and #2 were solved (and people have tried), you’re left with something that nobody really wants.
People don’t *want* to eat popcorn and watch a movie while they’re having gunpowder and sweat smells shoved in their face.
There is the odd exception (roses, fresh bread), but generally speaking, smelling is just not entertaining for humans.
Maybe for Dog TV it would be a seller.
We’d have to redo all the audio and video for dogs first, though, since right now they’re made for humans.
Light and sound are just different forms of energy. We pump energy into buildings in the form of electricity, and it’s not super difficult to transform it into different forms.
Smells are an actual physical thing. They’re physical molecules that enter your nose and interact with receptors. To recreate all sorts of different smells, you’d have to store all sorts of different molecules. And they’d get used up and need replacing. Assuming we even know the exact combination molecules for each particular smell.
Your body’s sensors are like locks that take very specific keys. They trigger a sensation when the correct “key” comes into contact with its corresponding “lock” attached to your body. If you want to fool one of these sensors, you need to be able to create its keys.
For vision, the “locks” in this case are special cells in the back of your eyes. In most people, there are four kinds of locks: three that sense color, and one that senses brightness. The “keys” for these locks are photons, little bits of light. If you want to fool this sensor, you need to be able to manufacture photons. This is actually quite easy to do. Any light source emits them. All you have to do is create a box that can recreate specific patterns of photons *very precisely*. i.e., a screen. That’s tech we have.
For sound, the “locks” are even simpler. The inside of your ear is coated with many tiny hair fibers. Their “keys” are simply vibrational patterns. Different hairs are sensitive to specific resonant vibrations. All you need to do to fake this kind of key is have some kind of machine that can vibrate any way you want it to. With electromagnets, we can do this extremely easily. That’s how speakers work.
Smell, though, that’s really tricky. There are *lots* of different locks for smell. Perhaps more than we could ever count. And all of those locks take extremely specifically-shaped molecules as keys. If you want to “fake” any arbitrary smell, you’re going to have to build a machine that can build all of these really specifically-shaped molecules and deliver them to the human nose in just the right proportions. That’s extremely hard. You’d need some kind of molecular 3D printer that can shovel out billions, trillions of nanoscopic little keys of arbitrary shapes and sizes made of all kinds of elements arranged in all sorts of ways. It simply can’t be done with any kind of technology we currently have.
The best thing you can do is make a machine that only creates one kind of key, to create one specific kind of smell. And it will never be *quite* right, either, since anything you smell in the normal world has a rich mix of many different keys in subtle ratios. Blasting the human nose with just one kind of key will certainly make you get a sensation *like* a certain thing that has a lot of that key in it, but it will be missing out on the countless tiny keys that make that subtle difference. It’s kind of the same story with taste, and why a lot of artificially-flaovred things taste, well, *artificial*.
Images are made of light and sound is made from vibrating the air. These are things we can easily replicate because it is easy with current technology to produce light of whatever color we wish and to vibrate the air at whatever frequency we wish.
But smell is very different. When you smell an apple pie, it is because molecules from the apple pie are actually being released from it, travelling through the air, and entering your nose.
We do not have the technology to create whatever molecules we wish and release them on demand.
Smell is matter. Sound and light is energy. With our current technology we can transmit/broadcast energy, but can not transmit/broadcast matter.
Naturally you can replicate your friends voice pretty accurate, but can not replicate his height, weight etc.
Sound and light is pretty simple – just waves with a few parameters to know to replicate them.
Replicating matter is insanely complicated since it has complex composition to the subatomic level.
Smelling is potentially a matter of life or death, so our sense of smell is much more sophisticated than our sense of sight. Sight is based on detecting just a couple of wavelengths, so we can reproduce pictures pretty easily. Our sense of smell can detect thousands of different combinations of chemicals. so try to reproduce it is hard.
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