Sure, it’s only designed for advertising purposes, and isn’t actually a real “real-world product” just yet, but this odourous display system from Taiwanese company GVision International was a pleasant surprise on the Computex floor.The smell-o-vision system is controlled by an 1.6GHz Atom-based PC running XP, 512MB RAM and an 80GB HDD. It runs the company’s smell-o-vision software to synchronise the video being displayed with a perfume module mounted on the side of the screen.
You can use any screen with the system, and at the moment the system is capable of expunging two scents, although the guy at the booth promised that soon they’d be able to push it up to 10 different flavours (odours). It was working pretty well while I was there – displaying a couple of perfume ads and pumping out a spray of each perfume at certain points during the commercials.
The guy on the stand wouldn’t talk price with me, but did say that they could scale to mass production very quickly (of course he’d say that though).
It’s a long way off moving into your loungeroom though, so don’t get too excited just yet…
[GVision, plus more Giz @ Computex]