Digital Smells
Q: What’s three thousand square feet and white all over?
…
Happy Wife brought the comfort last night, homemade chicken soup. And for me a grilled cheese sandwich — with thin sliced Claussen pickles, just what I’d asked for!
Go ahead, click it. Embiggen the savoriness.
Except you can’t really “see” savory, now can you?
Imagine a technology to digitize smells. A sort of scratch ‘n sniff for your computer.
Consider: You’re browsing the Internet one day and you happen upon a picture of chicken soup. You click it to make it larger. This downloads the digital image to your computer where it is then rendered in your browser, as happens now. But imagine if, in addition to the digital image, a digital smell associated with the image was downloaded as well, say a unique digital smell representing somebody’s chicken soup. Further, imagine your computer (or smart device) was equipped with an effuser, a hardware device capable of rendering digital smells, just like the screen on your computer (or phone) renders digital images. Now, instead of just seeing the picture of the chicken soup on the screen you literally smell the savoriness coming from the effuser as well. A kind of high tech Odorama. (For an old tech example see John Water’s film Polyester).
Now, as with any new technology, there will be abusers. Sure enough some dude’s gonna digitize his fart and associate it with a picture of a dozen roses or something. We’ll have to deal with that kind of nose porn. But we already have filters for viruses. I see no reason we can’t do the same for smells: “WARNING!, the attached .WHIF file smells awful!” Inevitably, though, some peoples’ devices will get infected. Some could be serious. Imagine: Every time you try to delete a bad .WHIF file it only makes the situation worse — before long your whole house smells a ripe baby diaper.
You can imagine that once Google gets a whif (haha) of this technology we’ll have smell searches. Or smells will be used to suggest shopping preferences: “People who liked this odor also liked…”
The possibilities are endless.
A: If you guessed the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters you were close. Correct answer was our backyard. Freak snowfall sneaked up on us last night.