Artificial intelligence (AI) has been used to successfully allow smells to be experienced remotely, performing what has been described as ‘scent teleportation’.
It’s not true teleportation, but involves all the intricacies of a particular smell being analysed and digitised.
The scent can then be reassembled at the destination, allowing a person at the receiving end to smell it.
The feat was achieved by US firm Osmo, which describes itself as a ‘digital olfaction’ company.
Osmo had previously achieved scent teleportation, having sent the smell of a slice of coconut from one side of a laboratory to the other.
Early efforts required human oversight and participation at every step, but now Osmo has automated the process using powerful AI systems.
In a video marking the breakthrough, Osmo chief executive officer Alex Wiltschko revealed that a fresh summer plum was “the first fruit and scent to be fully digitized and reprinted with no human intervention”.
“I’m still processing the magnitude of what we’ve done”, he said, admitting that he had taken to carrying the plum scent around with him.
System uses huge Principal Odor Map database of smells
The process builds on years of previous work and a huge database that Osmo calls its Principal Odor Map (POM).
This specially designed AI tool predicts how specific combinations of molecules will smell.
The scent to be teleported is first fed into a machine called the Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer (GC/MS).
Liquids can be inserted directly, while the scent from a solid such as a plum is gathered from the air around it.
The raw data is analysed and converted to molecular form and then uploaded to the cloud where it becomes a co-ordinate on the POM.
It can then be sent to one of Osmo’s Formulation Robots, which essentially treats it like an odour recipe and mixes different scents to replicate the original sample.
The technology needs more refinement but could pave the way for a number of applications, from therapy and diagnoses of conditions involving a loss of the sense of smell to making games, movies and virtual environments more immersive.
Osmo said that it envisions people encountering a beautiful smell on a hike and being able to send it as easily as sending a picture or a song.
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