🤖 Smells Can Now Be Transmitted Over the Internet
A team from Ohio State University (led by Chunyu Yang) published the Scentronic system in Science Advances. An 'electronic nose' based on gas sensors uses machine learning to recognize scents and sends data to the cloud via Wi-Fi. A wearable receiver sprays the aroma through a piezoelectric atomizer. Currently, it handles 5 scents: orange, cake, coffee, beer, and red wine; in a test with 14 volunteers, accuracy was 73%.
🌍 Olfaction lagged behind vision and sound: scent has no 'pixel.' The combination of ML and a compact atomizer opens the path to wearable devices for VR/AR, e-commerce, and diagnosing olfactory disorders.
👤 This is not 'recording any scent': it covers 5 aromas with 73% accuracy. But a step has been taken toward transmitting scent in calls and virtual worlds.
Source 1: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aee9266 Source 2: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2595189-digital-scents-could-add-a-new-dimension-to-virtual-worlds/