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Initech

(100,038 posts)
Wed Apr 3, 2013, 12:17 AM Apr 2013

Smell-O-Vision: No Longer Just For Cartoons

THAT fried chicken advert is about to get even more tempting. Soon it might be pumping out the mouth-watering smell of the stuff too. Tough luck if you're a veggie.

The "smelling screen", invented by Haruka Matsukura at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology in Japan and colleagues, makes smells appear to come from the exact spot on any LCD screen that is displaying the image of a cup of coffee, for example.

It works by continuously feeding odours from vaporising gel pellets into four air streams, one in each corner of the screen. These air streams are blown out parallel to the screen's surface by fans, and varying the strength and direction of them manoeuvres the scent to any given spot on the screen.

The airflow is gentle enough that the team have been able to create the illusion that the smell is actually wafting from a digital object on-screen. The current system only pumps out one scent at a time, but Matsukura says the next stage is to incorporate a cartridge, like those for printers, which allows smells to be changed easily.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729105.900-smellovision-screens-let-you-really-smell-the-coffee.html
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