SMELLIT: Smell-o-Vision Comes One Step Closer To Reality

It seems we're not the only ones that think 3-D might not be the next big step to improve our joy of watching television, but how comfortable is everyone with the concept of smell? It's hard to imagine how excruciating it would be to watch a character step in a pile of you-know-what and have the smell emitted to the audience, but those are the types of memorable experiences Portuguese designer Nuno Teixeira hopes to achieve with his newest concept, SMELLIT. On the bright side, one could only wonder what a trip to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory would be like if this tech ever came into production...

"SMELLIT works just like your printer, but instead of ink cartridges, it works with smell cartridges. As your DVD player reads the video and sound information from your favourite DVD disc, SMELLIT processes the same DVD, but the "smell CARD" decodes all the smell information from 10 to 20 seconds* ahead of the actual scene so the odours have time to reach the spectators."

"After decoding the smell information, the cartridge vaporizes a very small amount off concentrated “smell gel”, and the central fan distributes equally the smell in all directions. It can be loaded with 118 cartridges, each one with a different concentrated “smell gel”. All the cartridges can be easily changed and last 3 times more than a regular ink cartridge."

The smells are then "projected " to the audience through a small on-board fan located near the front of the device.

You've got us sold, Nuno. So when do we get to give this bad boy a try?

[via Dvice]

Comments (1)

Great idea - wrong application.

Why not just market this as the ultimate in room scenting. Rather than mess with the whole dvd thing, why not make it all about choosing any one of thousands of fragrances to infuse your space. Rather than cheesy scents like popcorn, the machine should have 118 of the most common and popular fragrance notes from which it can construct thousands of unique room fragrance combinations. So the cartridges would be single notes like tuberose, vetiver, cedar, patchouli, vanilla, fig, gardenia, bergamot, amber, etc - and the machine combines various fragrances to create unique room scents selected by the owner for any occasion.

Hollywood never going to jump on SmellOVision but the concept certainly has great potential in other areas.

posted by RichardinLA on February 13th 2009 at 6:57pm
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