But the contraption is not nearly as cool as it sounds. It
looks like you have to download an app and press a button
that causes the device to emit whatever scent is in the Chat
Perf connected to your friend’s phone. So you are not
actually texting smells to your friends. If you wanted to
send them a different smell each time, you would basically
have to send them different Chat Perf attachments, which
seems to defeat the purpose since the company says it would
charge $62.25 for each attachment.
It sounds like the company is more or less promoting the
invention as a marketing tool for now. The company told
RocketNews24 that concert venues could hand out Chat Perfs
filled with the performer’s favorite scent, or even the
smell of their own sweat, so that devoted fans could get a
whiff of them wherever they were in the audience. Smelling
sweaty music stars? Not exactly the most fun smell to share.
Popular Science points out that to make “smellepresence”
real, you would basically have to create an “electronic nose
” that could interpret smells the way human noses do. Then
the person receiving the scent would have to have a device on
his or her phone that could recognize the more than 10,000
odor molecules that humans can smell — and it is unlikely
that a device like that would be portable. Chat Perf seems
like it has a long way to go.
This zany idea reminds me of the time when Samsung and
researchers at the University of California-San Diego
announced that they were working on a Smell-O-Vision
prototype, which would allow televisions to emit smells as
you watched programming.
MORE: Like the Smell of New Apple Gadgets? There’s a
Fragrance for That
Let’s say you’re Italian. Your mother made “sunday gravy,
” a rich meat sauce cooked for hours and hours on the back
burner. There is sausage in there, and meatballs, and
tomatoes, and lots of garlic. Now you are a respected chef.
What are you going to do to pay tribute?
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