Imagine smelling a cake baking in someone else’s oven from thousands of miles away. Researchers have built a prototype system called Scentronic that detects certain aromas with sensors and artificial intelligence, then triggers a matching scent on a remote device.
The work, published in the journal Science Advances, comes from a team at Ohio State University. An electronic nose roughly 6 inches in diameter uses an array of gas sensors to recognize odors it has been trained to identify, including beer, cake, coffee, orange and red wine. The system classifies the smell and sends that information over the internet. At the receiving end, a small wearable device releases a corresponding fragrance from liquids it already holds. The actual scent molecules do not travel through the network.
“The idea is to add smell to the visual and audio information we already share remotely, making those experiences more engaging,” said Chunyu Yang, a doctoral candidate at Ohio State and lead author on the paper, according to Reuters. The researchers have built versions of the receiver as a wristband, a handheld unit and a necklace. In tests with volunteers, people correctly identified the recreated scents about 73 percent of the time.
The technology is still a research prototype and is not available as a commercial product. It currently works only with a small set of trained aromas, and new scents would require additional training data and matching liquid cartridges. Similar digital scent ideas have been explored for years, but earlier devices generally required users to select from a fixed menu rather than automatically detecting a smell in the environment and transmitting it.
Researchers say potential uses could include remote social interaction, online shopping or other situations where smell adds context to what people already see and hear. The system remains in the laboratory stage for now.
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