Tag Archives: oPhone

Smelling Paris in New York (update on the oPhone)

The American Museum of Natural History in New York was the recipient of the world’s first (?) transatlantic oPhone transmission on Tuesday, June 17, 2014. Linda Tischler provides an account of the event in her June 17, 2014 article about the latest on the oPhone for Fast Company (Note: Links have been removed),

At 11:31 EDT on Tuesday [June 17, 2014], an email message encoded with the scent of Paris, winged its way across the ether to land in the inbox of a Harvard professor waiting eagerly in a skull-littered basement room in New York’s American Museum of Natural History.

The onote, as such scent-embedded mail is known–originated at Le Laboratoire in Paris as a picture of a plate of macaroons and a glass of champagne, and was tagged via an iPhone app called oSnap, with the elements–tropical fruit, cocoa beans and champagne–that comprised their aroma.

messages [sic]–the aroma was, well, undeniably smelly, if a tad muddled. A hint of chocolate was there; something sort of fruity came through; the champagne would have been hard to detect without knowing what to smell for. Did it evoke wine and cookies? Not really. But, to its credit, the gadget worked.

“When you play all three scents at once, it’s sometimes hard to determine what you’re smelling,” says David Edwards, Harvard professor of idea translation and co-inventor of the device with Rachel Field, a former Harvard student.

I first mentioned David Edwards and Rachel Field along with their oPhone project in a Feb. 14, 2014 posting, which describes preliminary testing in Paris and provides links to a research paper. It seems there’s been good progress since then as the American Museum of Natural History is now preparing to host three oPhone hotspot weekends in July 2014 as Tischler notes in her article,

While potential users can currently download the app for free from the Apple app store, there’s no way yet for them to play their aromatic missives without going to an oPhone-equipped hotspot. Starting on July 12 [2014], and continuing for three consecutive weekends, the museum will host a hotspot in New York where people can come and retrieve the onotes they’ve been sent. There will be other hotspots in Paris and Cambridge, with more to come.

Since tagging photos with scent is a skill that few people have yet mastered, the museum will also host free “scent adventures,” where an olefactorially-skilled expert — a chef, a coffee connoisseur, or a chocolatier, for example — will coach aroma newbies in how to compose a scent that resembles what they’re smelling. The app itself comes with a vocabulary of “notes”–green vegetation, grilled bread, onion, jasmine, cedar, for example–that allows users to compose more than 300,000 different scents.

Weirdly, the American Natural History Museum’s June 17, 2014 news release about the oPhone and the upcoming ‘scent’ weekends provides less detail,

For three consecutive weekends starting on July 12 [2014], the Museum will feature an oPhone in its Sackler Educational Laboratory for Comparative Genomics and Human Origins, where visitors can try the technology and learn about how smell is processed in humans compared to our primate and hominid relatives.

It seems the museum’s weekend oPhone hotspot events came together very quickly since they are not yet (as of June 18, 2014 at 0930 hours PDT) listed in the museum’s July 2014 calendar of events.

A June 18, 2014 Harvard University news release by Alvin Powell provides some detail about the latest physical configuration for the oPhone,

The oPhone system consists of several parts. It begins with the oSnap app for iPhones (an android version is in development) that allows a user to create an oNote, consisting of a photograph and a smell created out of a palette of 32 scents available in the app that can be combined in 300,000 possible combinations.

The sender then forwards the oNote to an oPhone — the hardware portion of the enterprise — which re-creates the aroma from the oSnap app. The key component of the oPhone is the oChip, which creates the actual smell.

The oPhone looks a bit like a desk telephone, only instead of a handset, it has two small hollow towers — from which the newly created scents emerge — extending from the top.

In the hopes of making their oPhone more available the researchers and inventors have instituted an indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, oPhone Duo; bringing scent to mobile messaging,

There is a special offer which expires 12 pm (noon; 1200 hours) Paris time on June 19, 2014,

 $149 USD

LIMITED TIME OFFER – If you choose this perk between now and 12pm on June 19th Paris time, we will throw in an EXTRA PACK OF CUSTOM OCHIPS FOR FREE!!! Be among the first to buy an oPhone DUO. We’ll include one pack of oChips (replaceable aroma cartridges) that support two of our first aromatic vocabularies to get you started. What you get: 1 oPhone DUO 1 pack of Foodie I.D. oChips 1 pack of Base Notes oChips FREE SHIPPING

In two days (campaign opened June 16, 2014), they have raised $7800 towards a goal of $150,000 and a campaign deadline of July 31, 2014.

Good luck!

For the smell of it

Having had a tussle with a fellow student some years ago about what constituted multimedia, I wanted to discuss smell as a possible means of communication and he adamantly disagreed (he won),  these  two items that feature the sense of smell  are of particular interest, especially (tongue firmly in cheek) as one of these items may indicate I was* ahead of my time.

The first is about about a phone-like device that sends scent (from a Feb. 11, 2014 news item on ScienceDaily),

A Paris laboratory under the direction of David Edwards, Michigan Technological University alumnus, has created the oPhone, which will allow odors — oNotes — to be sent, via Bluetooth and smartphone attachments, to oPhones across the state, country or ocean, where the recipient can enjoy American Beauties or any other variety of rose.

It can be sent via email, tweet, or text.

Edwards says the idea started with student designers in his class at Harvard, where he is a professor.

“We invite young students to bring their design dreams,” he says. “We have a different theme each year, and that year it was virtual worlds.”

The all-female team came up with virtual aromas, and he brought two of the students to Paris to work on the project. Normally, he says, there’s a clear end in sight, but with their project no one had a clue who was going to pay for the research or if there was even a market.

A Feb. 11, 2014 Michigan Technological University news release by Dennis Walikainen, which originated the news item, provides more details about the project development and goals,

“We create unique aromatic profiles,” says Blake Armstrong, director of business communications at Vapor Communications, an organization operating out of Le Laboratorie (Le Lab) in Paris. “We put that into the oChip that faithfully renders that smell.”

Edwards said that the initial four chips that will come with the first oPhones can be combined into thousands different odors—produced for 20 to 30 seconds—creating what he calls “an evolution of odor.”

The secret is in accurate scent reproduction, locked in those chips plugged into the devices. Odors are first captured in wax after they are perfected using “The Nose”– an aroma expert at Le Lab, Marlène Staiger — who deconstructs the scents.

For example, with coffee, “the most universally recognized aroma,” she replaces words like “citrus” or “berry” with actual scents that will be created by ordering molecules and combining them in different percentages.

In fact, Le Lab is working with Café Coutume, the premier coffee shop in Paris, housing baristas in their building and using oPhones to create full sensory experiences.

“Imagine you are online and want to know what a particular brand of coffee would smell like,” Edwards says. “Or, you are in an actual long line waiting to order. You just tap on the oNote and get the experience.”

The result for Coutume, and all oPhone recipients, is a pure cloud of scent close to the device. Perhaps six inches in diameter, it is released and then disappears, retaining its personal and subtle aura.

And there other sectors that could benefit, Edwards says.

“Fragrance houses, of course, culinary, travel, but also healthcare.”

He cites an example at an exhibition last fall in London when someone with brain damage came forward. He had lost memory, and with it his sense of taste and smell.  The oPhone can help bring that memory back, Edwards says.

“We think there could be help for Alzheimer’s patients, related to the decline and loss of memory and olfactory sensation,” he says.

There is an image accompanying the news release which I believe are variations of the oPhone device,

Sending scents is closer than you think. [downloaded from http://www.mtu.edu/news/stories/2014/february/story102876.html]

Sending scents is closer than you think. [downloaded from http://www.mtu.edu/news/stories/2014/february/story102876.html]

You can find David Edwards’ Paris lab, Le Laboratoire (Le Lab), ici. From Le Lab’s homepage,

Opened since 2007, Le Laboratoire is a contemporary art and design center in central Paris, where artists and designers experiment at frontiers of science. Exhibition of works-in-progress from these experiments are frequently first steps toward larger scale cultural humanitarian and commercial works of art and design.

 

Le Laboratoire was founded in 2007 by David Edwards as the core-cultural lab of the international network, Artscience Labs.

Le Lab also offers a Mar. ?, 2013 news release describing the project then known as The Olfactive Project Or, The Third Dimension Global Communication (English language version ou en français).

The second item is concerned with some research from l’Université de Montréal as a Feb. 11, 2014 news item on ScienceDaily notes,

According to Simona Manescu and Johannes Frasnelli of the University of Montreal’s Department of Psychology, an odour is judged differently depending on whether it is accompanied by a positive or negative description when it is smelled. When associated with a pleasant label, we enjoy the odour more than when it is presented with a negative label. To put it another way, we also smell with our eyes!

This was demonstrated by researchers in a study recently published in the journal Chemical Senses.

A Feb. 11, 2014 Université de Montréal news release, which originated the news item, offers details about the research methodology and the conclusions,

For their study, they recruited 50 participants who were asked to smell the odours of four odorants (essential oil of pine, geraniol, cumin, as well as parmesan cheese). Each odour (administered through a mask) was randomly presented with a positive or negative label displayed on a computer screen. In this way, pine oil was presented either with the label “Pine Needles” or the label “Old Solvent”; geraniol was presented with the label “Fresh Flowers” or “Cheap Perfume”; cumin was presented with the label “Indian Food” or “Dirty Clothes; and finally, parmesan cheese was presented with the label of either the cheese or dried vomit.

The result was that all participants rated the four odours more positively when they were presented with positive labels than when presented with negative labels. Specifically, participants described the odours as pleasant and edible (even those associated with non-food items) when associated with positive labels. Conversely, the same odours were considered unpleasant and inedible when associated with negative labels – even the food odours. “It shows that odour perception is not objective: it is affected by the cognitive interpretation that occurs when one looks at a label,” says Manescu. “Moreover, this is the first time we have been able to influence the edibility perception of an odour, even though the positive and negative labels accompanying the odours showed non-food words,” adds Frasnelli.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Now You Like Me, Now You Don’t: Impact of Labels on Odor Perception by  Simona Manescu, Johannes Frasnelli, Franco Lepore, and Jelena Djordjevic. Chem. Senses (2013) doi: 10.1093/chemse/bjt066 First published online: December 13, 2013

This paper is behind a paywall.

* Added ‘I was’ to sentence June 18, 2014. (sigh) Maybe I should spend less time with my tongue in cheek and give more time to my grammar.