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IT IS a gadget straight out of a science fiction story: a machine that can record a smell and play it back to you at your leisure.
Present it with a designer perfume or freshly baked bread and it will analyse the odour and reproduce it for you later using a mixture of non-toxic chemicals.
Engineers hope a successful smell-recording device could be useful for online shopping — allowing customers to smell products before buying them — or to add another dimension to television. It could even be used by doctors to remotely diagnose patients, by recreating the smell of blood, bile or urine to help with a diagnosis. Pambuk Somboon, of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, who is leading the development of the smell-recording gadget, told New Scientist that while aroma generators have been produced in the past, they have failed commercially because the number of smells they can produce has always been limited.
In his system, there are no pre-prepared smells, just 15 chemical-sensing electric noses that can pick up a wide range of smells.
Once the sensors pick up the various components of an aroma, it is re-created from an ingredient list of 96 chemicals in the machine. These chemicals can be tailored to the potential use of the gadget. Drops from the relevant chemicals are mixed, heated and vapourised. In tests so far, the gadget has successfully recorded and reproduced the smells of a number of fruit.
· Alok Jha
