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?
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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.
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