thank you for your post. The simulation/communication of odours has been a longtime wish, maybe since the invention of the (partially) synthetic perfumes by Guerlain in the XIX Century. Remaining in the XX Century, and especially in the end of the Nineties, we should remember the olfactory cinema.
Here a minimal history:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/115323.html
And some other info:
http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=71
Some movies from tha era were:
Carlo Lizzani, "Behind the Great Wall" (1959); Jack Cardiff, "Scent of Mystery" (1960).
Their sentence was: "First they moved (1895)! Then they talked (1927)! Now they smell!" But it was a commercial and industrial failure which involved some producers (like Mike Todd Jr.) and companies.
More recently two olfactory movies were directed, but with different integration with the olfactory information:
John Waters, "Polyester" (1981); Luc Besson, "Le Grand Bleu" (1989). In the first in some film sequences you had to scratch and sniff some numbered areas on a cardboard when the numbers appeared on the screen (really funny, I have some of them and the odours are still preserved); while the second movie instead is totally set in a marine environment, so the persistence of the olfactory information was not a problem.
In 1999 the american company Digiscents tryed to give a smell to computer information with its Ismell Personal Scent Synthesizer
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell and http://www.scribd.com/doc/29177062/i-smell-technology ), a sort of box which connected to a personal computer via USB or serial port and was designed to emit a smell when a user visited a web site or opened an email. In 2006, the iSmell was named one of the "25 Worst Tech Products of All Time" by PC World Magazine.
Indee it is interesting that, although all the failures, there are people and companies that periodically presents projects involving the smell. In one way this enhances the fact the smell is a very important sense in the human life and communication; on the other side all the failures show we have not still understood how this sense and the olfactory communication work.
Cheeers :-)
Pier Luigi
Il giorno 18/gen/2011, alle ore 02.34, Clarissa Ribeiro Pereira de Almeida ha scritto:
> And here, something about "computer-controlled olfactory displays" and smell
> simulation...
>
>
> On "Proustian effects"
>
> We can experience odors that tap into emotionally charged memories. This
> phenomenon has its roots in the olfactory system – some smells can trigger
> memories of events that take place many years earlier. A phenomenon of
> Involuntary
> memory. A very famous mention in literature of this kind of sensorial event
> in the Marcel Proust novel *In Search of Lost Time*, where the
> narrator experiences
> an awakening upon tasting a madeleine dipped in tea:
>
>
>
> "She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called petites
> madeleines, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop
> of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with
> the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the
> tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm
> liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through
> my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that
> were taking place…at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to
> me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory […]" (Marcel
> Proust, *Remembrance
> of Things Past, Volume 1: Swann's Way*. London: Chatto and Windus, 1922.)
>
>
>
> Recognizing *odors associated with meaningful places*:
>
> http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/amerjpsyc.123.3.0281
>
> MIT Neuroscientists Explain 'Proustian Effect' Of Small Details Attached To
> Big Memories:
> http://chem.info/News/Feeds/2011/01/topics-plant-operations-mit-neuroscientists-explain-proustian-effect-of-sm/
>
> Projection-Based Olfactory Display with Nose Tracking
> ISBN: 0-7803-8415-6
> Most attempts to realize an olfactory display have involved capturing and
> synthesizing the odor. This work focus on spatio-temporal control of odor
> rather than synthesizing odor itself:
> http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/VR.2004.1310054
>
>
> <http://chem.info/News/Feeds/2011/01/topics-plant-operations-mit-neuroscientists-explain-proustian-effect-of-sm/>
>
> And here we can read about the *SubSmell System*:
>
> The idea of adding the SubSmell logo to the movie for describing the scent
> of each event in the movie has been proposed to improve the current way of
> seeing movies, which can perceive only pictures and sound. Using the
> SubSmell, the audience can smell the movie. The audiences need a SubSmell
> application to read a SubSmell and an olfactory display in order to release
> scent.
>
> http://www.springerlink.com/content/p642p43x04n61567/
>
> A Thesis on "*Symbolic Olfactory Display*" exploring the problems and
> possibilities of computer-controlled scent output.
>
> by Joseph Nathaniel Kaye
>
> S.B. Brain & Cognitive Science,
>
> Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1999
>
> http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~jofish/thesis/symbolic_olfactory_display.html
>
>
> Clarissa Ribeiro
--
Pier Luigi Capucci
e-mail: plc@noemalab.org
web: http://www.noemalab.org/plc/plc.html
skype: plcapucci
--
Pier Luigi Capucci
e-mail: plc@noemalab.org
web: http://www.noemalab.org/plc/plc.html
skype: plcapucci
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