With this printer, what you see is what you smell - tech - 22 October 2010 - New Scientist

With this printer, what you see is what you smell - tech - 22 October 2010 - New Scientist

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. 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.