Doesn’t it seem like being able to smell a TV show would be undesirable a lot of the time? TV presenter cologne would be wafting around your grandma’s all through Easter dinner and then your house would smell like blood after the Game of Thrones premiere.
But you gotta give the people what they want, right? And somebody has been wanting to smell the screen since the early 1900s. So Japanese researchers at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology have been working on it, and debuted their “smelling screen” at the IEEE Virtual Reality conference in Orlando.
The TV is a normal LCD screen equipped with four fans that create targeted airflow by modulating their speeds. The scents come from hydrogel “aroma chips” which give off vapor when heated, and the TV is supposed to give the overall impression that smells are emanating from their corresponding object on screen, like a cake or an infected stab wound.
If it really works, the technology would still face pretty major implementation challenges, but at least it would be a smell-o-vision technology that, you know, works. People just won’t rest until this one is checked off the bucket list. [The Verge]