That crisp apple colour and that crisp apple smell could one day come out of the same ink-jet printer, if an idea hatched in a Japanese lab takes off, writes Paul Marks from New Scientist.
Using technology from existing ink-jet printers, the idea is to generate evocative aromas to complement images on your computer or TV, from the scent of a mown lawn in a family photo to truffles in a cookery show.
Scent-assisted movies were tried out in the mid-20th century. AromaRama pumped scent into cinema air conditioning, while the rival Smell-O-Vision had its own dedicated system of pipes.
Both were abject failures, with noisy machinery or patchy odours. Worst of all, each aroma lingered too long and mixed with the next, blending into a noxious stench by the closing credits.
More recent attempts to make whiffy peripherals, such as the iSmell USB device from Digiscents in 2000, fell at the same hurdle.
But ink-jet printing technology can do the job, according to Kenichi Okada of Keio University in Tokyo and colleagues, who will present their work at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Multimedia conference in Florence, Italy, next week.
“We are using the ink-jet printer’s ability to eject tiny pulses of material to achieve precise control,” Okada told New Scientist.
In the most common type of ink-jet, a pulse of current heats a coil of wire, creating bubbles that force a small volume of ink down a tube and onto the page at high speed.
The Keio team use the same hardware to squirt scent. Working with printer maker Canon, they converted the guts of an off-the-shelf printer into what they call an olfactory display, capable of rapidly switching between four aromas.
They found that a standard Canon ink-jet can eject as little as a picolitre of scent droplets in 0.7 milliseconds.
That is too little to smell, but pulses 100 milliseconds long produced perceivable aromas of lemon, vanilla, lavender, apple, cinnamon, grapefruit and mint.
Better still, a 100-millisecond ink-jet burst dissipates fast, at least in the team’s small-scale experiment. After an average of two human breaths it has gone, allowing a different smell to be activated.
The next step is to work out how to automatically sync scents with pictures, says Okada. If it works, a single ink-jet machine might serve as both printer and odour projector.
Such technology might have applications beyond entertainment, according to Stephen Brewster at the University of Glasgow, UK, who studies human-computer interaction.
His group is researching ways to give people with dementia unobtrusive reminders that they need to take pills, for example, or need to eat.
“A strong smell of food might do that but our technology is very basic – blowing a fan over smell-infused felt. We need a better way, and this might be it,” he says.
But building a general-purpose aroma creator won’t be easy, says Brewster. “We don’t yet know how to synthesise all the scents we want.
There is no red-green-blue for smell – there are thousands of components needed. You can’t synthesise raspberry from chocolate.”
Source:http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/1393846/Scientists-print-pages-with-%27aroma%27
