In today’s age, we have many different forms of communicating with one another. Emails, text messages, and phone calls have all become part of our daily routine, as they are quick ways to transmit large amounts of information. But what if there was a device that incorporated another of our senses when it comes to communication: the sense of smell?
Le Leboratoire created the oPhone, a device that aims to make olfactory communication the norm by transmitting odors in the same fashion we send text messages. Inside the device is the oChip, a little cartridge about the size of a small tack that contains olfactive information that produces hundreds of odor signals. These chips can be installed in the oPhone, and using an app called oTracks, you can send scents to an oPhone user with one push.
David Edwards, the creator of Le Leboratoire, says that the amount of odor signals a chip can send should increase into the thousands in the near future. His team unveiled a prototype last year that used a system of four cylindrical oPhones that could be loaded up to eight chips. This created something he called an “odor symphony," the ability to create a multi-odiferous message. Edwards stated that those odor signals allow him to “create sentences, paragraphs and essays” of odor messages. A little hyperbole here, but you get the idea.
The final product is due out later in 2014 and will come with two oPhones.
[via Wired]
