Digitising Smell: The Third Sense Is Coming to Your Phone

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By  / September 11, 2014 10:34 AM EDT

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In an interview recorded to mark his birthday, Mel Brooks’ celebrated comic character The 2000 Year Old Man addressed what he considered to be the most worrying development in the modern world. His major concern was not, he explained, related to matters such as world peace or the erosion of individual liberty. “It’s something much more important than that,” he said. “Smell. They are taking our smells away; all of our own individual smells. They have a smell for everything today. Under the arms. Up the nose. In the crotch.” The consequence, he complained, was that “You don’t know who the hell you’re dealing with any more. You can’t tell the difference between men and women. You can’t tell who’s who. And that,” he concluded, “is no way to live”.

The 2000 Year Old Man was not noted for his insight or perception: he recalled having snubbed such figures as Moses and Jesus (“a thin lad who came into the store but never bought anything”) opting instead to worship “this guy called Phil”. His fears over the pervasiveness of artificial scent, however, are proving to have been a rare moment of prescience. To most of us, who have long taken for granted the computerised broadcasting of sound and vision, the idea of transmitting smells digitally still seems absurd. So much so that, when I informed friends that I had just taken delivery of a Scentee – a small device which enables its owner to send or receive aromas telephonically – they assumed it to be a joke.

The Scentee may not look like much. A miniature plastic globe, or dongle, it is a little smaller than a cherry tomato, and connects to the audio socket of a smartphone. Download the relevant app, and the device can be activated either independently, by the user, or remotely, when another Scentee owner gives it a call. The dongle glows blue and emits, in a delicate flourish that resembles the vapour from an e-cigarette, the fragrance from whichever chemical cartridge has been loaded into it. Available scents include bacon, short ribs, coffee and buttered potato.

The device was manufactured in Japan, inspired by the research work of Adrian David Cheok. The award-winning scientist, formerly head of Singapore’s Mixed Reality Lab, now has the title Professor of Pervasive Computing at London’s City University.

The Scentee is still a novelty in Britain; during a demonstration given in June, at the Natural History Museum, many children in the audience argued, with some urgency, that sales would increase considerably should the professor seek to develop a broader range of fragrances, such as camel fart.

The Scent Scientist

Cheok, 42, meets me at his HQ, a small laboratory at City University. An engaging and articulate man, dressed all in black, he looks more like a seasoned rock guitarist than a research scientist. He is accompanied by two of his PhD students, German-born Marius Braun, and Jordan Tewell, from Ohio. “I was especially impressed,” I tell Cheok, “when I dialled up the mashed potatoes.” (Hearing myself say this, I can’t help thinking the professor that, over the years, I have interviewed one man who has walked on the moon, and another who ate an entire Cessna light aircraft in Venezuela, and still this conversation feels as surreal as any I’ve had). “But what,” I ask him, “is the point of this technology? Is anybody actually using the Scentee?”

“Absolutely they are. Previously I was based at Keio University, in Tokyo. We were doing a big project on food media. I was collaborating with a friend, Koku Tsubouchi, who is an entrepreneur. We, the academics, maintained our focus on research, while his company developed a commercial product,” which, he says, became the first mobile device for producing smell. “Scentee,” he adds, “is a profitable company. They sell thousands of units a month in Japan.”

Cheok grew up in Adelaide, where he was born to a Malaysian father and Greek mother. He began his academic life in Australia as an electrical engineer, though it’s difficult to imagine him having considered devoting his life to so narrow and orthodox a discipline. You sense in him an unusual confluence of rigour, creative imagination, and just a little mischief. “I can see that this thing is fun,” I tell him. “But is it ever going to be more than a gimmick?”

Marius Braun plays a video that was filmed in the Mugaritz restaurant, close to the Basque city of San Sebastián. Andoni Luis Aduriz, head chef at Mugaritz (currently ranked sixth in the world by the British magazine Restaurant) has been collaborating with the inventors of the Scentee. He is famous for shocking and surprising his clientele. Diners are given no advance warning of the menu, whose 20 dishes seek to excite every sense, as well as stimulating emotion and memory.

The video from the Mugaritz shows customers embarking on the traditional first course, which requires each of them to prepare a broth by crushing herbs and spices in a mortar. Armed with a smartphone loaded with the Scentee app, a prospective visitor can simulate the grinding action by rotating the phone’s display, where an image of the bowl appears. As the ingredients appear to disintegrate, the Scentee emits aromas of black pepper, sesame and saffron. “The idea,” says Cheok, “is that you can virtually experience some of the food in the restaurant.”

The professor has also collaborated with the Kraft-owned meat brand Oscar Mayer to produce a bacon-scented alarm clock. Possibly sensing that this innovation may defy the traditional dynamic whereby an invention is created to meet a need, Oscar Mayer has produced an ambitious promotional video, a copy of which is in the lab. We look on as a young woman navigates a landscape of dry ice, dodging a hail of bacon rashers. Wearing a diaphanous low-cut gown which seems recklessly unsuited to these inclement surroundings, she caresses her torso with one hand, and brandishes a spatula in the other.

“At darkest midnight,” says a male narrator, against a sequence of erotic images that Ken Russell might have rejected as less than subtle, “the nostril’s north star awakes you.” The film ends with the woman waking to a working Scentee and the slogan: “Want your own bacon scent alarm?”

To which most of us would answer, “Probably not.” After all, the Teasmade – hugely popular in the 1970s – has all but died out and that, at least, had tea in it. It is, however, undeniably reassuring to learn that, should any of us find ourselves overpowered by the desire to own a bacon alarm, through Scentee we can at least get our hands on one.

Adrian Cheok at City University has been covering mixed reality, human-computer interfaces and wearable computers throughout his career. Adrian Cheok/Alamy
Adrian Cheok at City University has been covering mixed reality, human-computer interfaces and wearable computers throughout his career. Adrian Cheok/Alamy

If his hardware for the replication of smell is relatively sophisticated, Cheok’s prototype apparatus for simulating taste is somewhat more basic, not to say alarming. Marius Braun hands me a device that consists of a pair of metal prongs that are spring-loaded and look rather like a large clothes peg. The gadget is attached to a piece of circuit board and battery leads. “It’s only 40 milliamps,” Braun tells me, as he eases the prongs apart and invites me to place my tongue between them.

Sitting at a table, mouth open, wired up to the apparatus and waiting for the young German to press the switch, I’m reminded of a Bob Hope line from the 1940 comedy, Road to Singapore: “My mother told me there would be moments like these. How did she know?” The electrical current on the tip of my tongue produces a sharp taste, like lemon. Cheok says that the team are experimenting using different combinations of heat and amperage. They can replicate four of the five known tastes: sour, salty, bitter and sweet. (The fifth, umami, a savoury note akin to MSG, was officially discovered in 1908.)

Brave New Smells

Cheok began his career in computing at Mitsubishi Research labs in Japan. Subsequently, at the Singapore Mixed Reality Laboratory, he led a team of 100 researchers and students and produced highly-acclaimed work that placed recordings of three-dimensional human figures into mixed-reality landscapes: the results have been compared to the hologram effects employed by Star Wars director, George Lucas.

The professor’s work in transmitting touch via the internet currently takes the form of a plastic ring slipped over the finger. The prototype is impressively small, even if it couldn’t yet be mistaken for a desirable accessory. It vibrates whenever the wearer of an identical ring presses their own device. They could be in the next room or, wireless connections permitting, in Martinique. It’s a signalling mechanism that has obvious potential for connecting with lost children or, as the research team tell me, with residents in care homes whose other senses may be impaired. The ring represents the first stage of Cheok’s ambition to create a device which, as he puts it, “will allow people to give each other a virtual hug”.

The notion of being able to blend and disseminate smell and taste is not a new one. As early as 1884, the French writer J K Huysmans published his novel À Rebours (Against Nature) in which the main character owned a “mouth organ”, consisting of a keyboard connected to tubes leading to casks of liqueurs, enabling the player to compose, and consume, a kind of alcoholic symphony. Hotel rooms in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World are equipped with a scent organ. Replicating such devices in the real world proved to be somewhat challenging.

In the 1930s, an American-Swiss scientist called Hans Laube developed a system for releasing fragrance into cinema auditoriums. Variations on his system, the first attempt at what is generally termed Smell-o-Vision, were tested in the late 1950s. Its most famous incarnation was in Michael Todd Jr’s 1960 cinema production Scent of Mystery, starring Peter Lorre and Elizabeth ­Taylor.

Laube’s invention, intended to have a humble supporting role at the movie’s premier, immediately occupied centre stage. Poor ventilation exposed patrons to a combination of odours including rose, seaweed, wine, peppermint, shoe polish and cordite. It proved too heady a cocktail for some guests, who were overcome by panic and nausea.

“This all-out attack on the sense of smell,” complained the New York Times, “assaults the nose as a mixture of paint thinner and dimestore perfume, and leaves a sweet, cloying scent reminiscent of an undertaker’s parlour.”

The history of what is usually referred to as digital scent technology is less than 20 years old. In 1999, a firm called DigiScents unveiled a device that allowed users to trigger a limited range of smells when they opened an email. Other companies, in Tokyo, San Diego and Tel Aviv, are reported to be close to achieving commercially viable smell technology in a form that can be incorporated into a surround sound system.

The Smellophone

In June, the Parisian design centre Le Laboratoire, founded and directed by Harvard’s Professor of the Practice of Idea Translation, David A Edwards, announced the imminent release of its oPhone DUO. Le Laboratoire claims that the system will ultimately be able to release 300,000 unique aromas. This device is essentially a sophisticated smell modem, with the capacity to blend multiple odours. While far more complex than the Scentee, which can only deliver one smell at a time, the Duo looks less like a mobile phone than something we might see on a dental hygienist’s tray, and will not be available until the spring of 2015.

The Scentee 'balloon', attached to the earphone jack of your smartphone, sprays the aroma of choice. Aire-freshener-like cartridges include scents of rosemary, lavender and coffee. Phil Sills for Newsweek
The Scentee ‘balloon’, attached to the earphone jack of your smartphone, sprays the aroma of choice. Aire-freshener-like cartridges include scents of rosemary, lavender and coffee. Phil Sills for Newsweek

I ask Edwards the question that recurs whenever the subject of computerised smell comes up: what’s the point? “We see several exciting areas of application,” he says. One of these ­concerns: “companies operating in an environment with a strong aromatic value.”

“Waste disposal?”

“People marketing coffee, or flowers,” Edwards explains. “If I am in a nice coffee shop in New York, I have the ability, while standing in line, to smell the notes of a coffee.”

This facility, he argues, can be of great assistance in “dialoguing with the barista”. That last phase might sound alien to some members of British café society, whose concept of barista dialoguing has yet to advance beyond such phrases as: “Milk and sugar?”

“There is so much that people can do with this,” Edwards says. “Smell is the ultimate tweet. Your nose is made for it. One of our investors is a big lover of dogs. They make films for your dog when you are away. So you can leave your dog watching a bird movie, say, but at the moment he can’t smell anything. Now we have the opportunity to communicate using smell across species.” Given the not-insignificant gulf between the aromatic preferences of the human and the dog – the one tends to favour rose, patchouli or vetiver, while the other has a penchant for fox excretia – I find myself hoping that this particular branch of the information super-highway will remain a one-way street.

Guests at a recent demonstration of the oPhone at Los Angeles’ Institute for Art and Olfaction agreed that the device is, as the Institute’s founder and executive director, Saskia Wilson-Brown puts it, “definitely functional. David took a picture of a Perrier can on the phone, assigned four scents to it using his app, and sent the ‘oNote’ to the machine, which released the scents over the course of about a minute. They were definitely perceptible.”

The Great Nose

The inconvenient truth about taste and smell is that they don’t operate quite like the other senses. The sensation of smell is produced by the stimulation of the olfactory bulb, a structure located in the forebrain.

“The thing about scent,” Cheok says, showing me a diagram of the skull, “is that our basic receptors are not working as they usually do. Eyes and ears measure frequency. Smell is more analogous to a sensor. With sound you can cut out 80% of the data and it will still sound OK. With smell, it has to be exactly right. Taste offers a similar challenge.”

The professor’s mission “is to merge the virtual world with the senses. The internet is ­rapidly moving from behind our desktop into the physical world of taste and touch, as well as smell.”

I took my Scentee down to James ­Craven, chief archivist for Les Senteurs, the specialist perfumiers in central London. Acknowledged as one of the great “noses” in the fragrance world, Craven is more accustomed to advising clients on the sophisticated notes in the products of master perfumiers such as Olivier Creed, widely regarded as the most distinguished living creator of scents. The House of Creed was established in 1760, since when its scents have been worn by figures including Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill, Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, Michael Jackson, Prince Charles, Michelle Obama and both Elvises – Presley and Costello. (“I remember very clearly the first time I ever wore Creed,” Costello told me. “Because I had never previously had strangers coming up to me in the street and saying, ‘You smell tremendous’.”)

Craven looks a little uneasy as I load my dongle with Chinese short ribs. Asking this man to assess the Scentee is a bit like recruiting a Formula One champion to test-drive a milk float. He stands gamely in the line of fire. “OK,” he says, with a much higher intonation on the second syllable, as the first jet of fragrance strikes what the Oscar Mayer people would call the north star of his nostril. “That is definitely  . . . meat.”

“I own this equipment,” I tell him. “Are you envious?”

“Not to the point that is unmanageable,” he replies. “As it is designed at the moment, this looks more like a kind of a toy to me. At the same time I’m sure that this is something that can be refined and developed. I think the basic idea is very exciting.”

Etat Libre d'Orange's Fat Electrician is a man 'raised in the big air of Texas, his soft skin scrubbed by ears of wheat'. Etat Libre d'Orange
Etat Libre d’Orange’s Fat Electrician is a man ‘raised in the big air of Texas, his soft skin scrubbed by ears of wheat’. Etat Libre d’Orange

 

The only complex fragrance I have any knowledge about is Creed, mainly as a result of having met the parfumier on a few occasions.

“The psychological effect of these fine scents is on the wearer,” I suggest. “You definitely feel more confident when wearing, say, Creed’s Royal Water. [As well you might, at £180 a bottle.] It can feel, as one fragrance expert said to me, ‘like wearing armour’.”

“I have no doubt of that,” says Craven. “Some are aphrodisiac, some are relaxing. Some put you in a brisk frame of mind.”

Les Senteurs keeps a range of fragrances which include one called Sécrétions Magnifiques. “I’d be a bit wary,” Craven says, as he puts a sample on a testing strip. “There is an accord of sweat and blood in this,” he says. (And, according to Sécrétions Magnifiques’ distributors, a firm called Etat Libre d’Orange, “notes of sperm and saliva”.) “That smell,” I tell him, “really is feral.”

“But many do love it,” Craven says, as he uncorks an equally bracing scent with the name Fat Electrician.

Another London-based perfume expert, Michael Donovan, gave me a Gaultieri fragrance called “Narcotic Venus”. This is based on tuberose: a flower that single women, historically, were not allowed to pick in its native Mexico, for fear that its supposed erotic properties might have them ravished in the fields. Narcotic Venus, Donovan told me, is “not one to wear to the office”.

But it is a blushing virgin compared to “Complex,” a perfume by Englishman Michael Boadi. “Complex is so pungent and strong,” Donovan says, “that it feels as if your head is about to explode. To me it smells as though two people have been in a hotel bedroom for two days, in sweat-soaked sheets, and not gone out or opened the windows.” It’s a description that once it is in mind it’s difficult to shift, though the scent of Complex is perversely hypnotic.

“Does it sell?”

“By the bucket load.”

“Who to?”

“Mainly women.”

Piss and Biscuit

But is it possible that smell – whether naturally produced, or chemically simulated, as in the Scentee – really does have a psychological effect on the wearer; something that may lie beyond their ability to control? I consulted New-York-based author Avery Gilbert, a fragrance expert who is also a psychologist trained in neuroscience. Gilbert’s 2008 book What The Nose Knows: The Science of Smell in Everyday Life is a wonderful social history of scent, elegantly written to the point that it captivates people with no previous interest in the subject.

“In terms of neuroanatomy,” Gilbert says, “other sensory systems, sight and touch for example, go through the thalamus, in the brain structure – at which point we become consciously aware of what’s happening. Smell bypasses the thalamus. Researchers have observed the brain responding to scent at levels that are too low for the test subject to detect. There’s little doubt that odours can be registered subconsciously.”

“I think that putting on a really memorable perfume” I suggest to Gilbert, “can alter your mood in the same way that you might drive differently, depending on whether you’re listening to some ­dismal Bach fugue, or to ZZ Top. The difference with smell is that you could be – for marketing reasons – exposed to the equivalent of ZZ Top without knowing it.”

“That’s a useful analogy,” the ­academic replies. “I have definitely noticed that effect on my own driving, depending on whether I want to relax, or I crank the music up. A number of my passengers have remarked on it.”

“There’s a piece by the British poet John Cooper Clarke,” I tell him, called ‘Things are Going to Get Worse’. It contains the lines: ‘Things are going to get worse, nurse / I ain’t optimistic / I’ve got a mouth shaped like a purse, nurse / And a bungalow smelling of piss and biscuit’. Those final three words might not make an ideal title for a fragrance – not unless it was aimed at the Labrador retriever market – but such an aroma could, presumably, be replicated in the laboratory?”

“Absolutely. The only question would be whether you wanted wine urine or vodka urine. You – coming, as I recall, from Manchester – might prefer the full-on stench of a soccer ground urinal, though I did hear that smell has diminished recently, because a lot of supporters have taken to relieving themselves in the parking lot.” After that, Gilbert suggests, it would just be a question of whether you wanted to add a hint of HobNob or Penguin biscuits.

Even today, there is still some debate as to the way that smell operates. The writer and biophysicist Luca Turin takes issue with the orthodox position (namely that the shape of molecules dictates their effect on nasal receptors) and believes that vibrational qualities of particles determine smell.

Turin, with his wife Tania Sanchez, produced an entertaining 2008 best­seller: Perfumes: The A-Z Guide. A charismatic polymath, he remains somewhat isolated in the world of perfume scientists. What’s really curious about Luca Turin is that, for a man stubbornly wedded to scientific process in his research, he writes about scent with the kind of audacious cross-cultural comparisons that used to give French wine critics a bad name.

Turin describes Guérlain’s Mitsouko (established in 1919 and still going strong) as “pure Brahms, the string sextets, intricate but rather monochrome”. “‘Tommy Girl’ (Tommy Hilfiger) on the other hand, “gives you Prokofiev’s first symphony”. Of Black, by Bulgari: “At different times, it will strike you as a battle hymn for Amazons, emerald green plush fit for Napoleon’s box at the Opera, or plain sweet and smiling.” Turin is very rude about Olivier Creed, and once suggested that he might have been on the sauce when he devised one of his great fragrances, Virgin Island Water.

However a smell reaches the brain, what’s undeniable is that exposure to it can be profoundly connected to memory. If I can strike a personal note, were a woman to approach me wearing a ­fragrance that combined Mitsouko with notes of Paris Métro air, Pouilly Fumé and a hint of Benson and Hedges – a creation I like to call “Sorcière#101” – I would have no doubt that she was ­trouble.

Smell: The Final Frontier

The emotional impact of half-forgotten smells is all the greater because they frequently arrive without warning, and represent stimuli over which we have little or no control.

We are regularly, often unwittingly, exposed to scent when we visit many large retailers. The practice goes far beyond what you may have noticed – food stores pumping out, for instance, the smell of baking bread, chocolate or coffee beans. One well-known shirt retailer infuses its outlets with the smell of fresh laundry. Experiments have indicated that such subliminal techniques are highly effective.

Cheok emphasises that his goal is “not just to pump smells into a store, but to stream them online”. That said, Gilbert tells me, the digitisation of scent makes it far easier to manipulate in public areas.

Efficient Smell-o-Vision is now an achievable reality; the magician David Copperfield has successfully used such effects in his Las Vegas shows. One 1999 study conducted at a casino in that city indicated that fragrances can increase the average spend by 45%. Every major Las Vegas operator now manipulates odour, most to highly sophisticated ­levels.

Is Cheok correct, I asked Gilbert, when he says that the line between biology and digital hardware is starting to blur? “Absolutely he is,” Gilbert tells me. “I am currently advising a silicon valley start-up company called Aeromyx. What they have is a biochip which will allow them to anchor all 400 of the human olfactory receptor proteins. It scans the 400 receptors, and records which has been activated and to what extent. That gives you a digital signal of a smell based on the biological receptors in the human nose. And that is completely crossing the line.”

“So,” I ask him, “how do you feel about the Scentee?”

“This one,” Gilbert replies, “has ­puzzled me. I am a big fan of olfactory technology of all sorts, but this device, given that the smells are loaded one at a time, does seem a trifle cludgy in its current form.”

Where the Scentee is concerned, ­Gilbert continues, “I do admire the vision and the technology. And I am extremely interested in the idea of using the senses for information signalling. For ­example,” he says, expanding on the idea that I’d heard Cheok’s team outline in London, “if you had people in an assisted-living home and you needed to remind them that it was dinner time, this could be achieved very effectively by smell. Scent might also be a useful way of alerting you to processes that are building gradually. As you become increasingly tense, for instance, smell could be calibrated to intensify, as a signal to tell you that your heart rate was increasing and remind you that it was time to take a deep breath, and relax.”

Mel Brooks’ 2000 Year Old Man was right: in the future, smell is the sense most likely to preoccupy us, in ­combination with digital technology. “All of the means of delivery are there,” Gilbert says. “It is simply a matter of finding the right application. People are now thinking about architecture that is sensitive to the people who are inside it. Buildings could potentially be designed so as to sense, for example, heart rate. They could have an olfactostat; a thermostat for smells.”

“Have you been surprised,” I ask Cheok, “by the speed with which your research has progressed in order to produce something like the Scentee, or do you feel frustrated that things haven’t moved faster?”

“Both,” he replies. “I have big visions and I am aware that these things necessarily take time. This is not like working in a bank. When you are trying to take quantum leaps, there are bound to be failures. But I think that ultimately, with rigour and perseverance, an ambitious approach leads to the most important research.”

Is it actually possible, I ask Gilbert, that we are on the brink of a new age, with regard to digital transmission of scent? Are we going to be surprised at what is achievable in the next 25 years?

“We will be surprised,” he replies, “much sooner than that. Now that we have wirelessly-controlled scent devices, we’re just looking for the applications. When somebody produces the right combination of technology and smell, the resulting product will be very, very big.”

Globally, Cheok concedes, there are many teams of scientists endeavouring to digitise the sensual world. Many of his competitors, in Tokyo, Harvard and Paris, enjoy facilities far more lavishly equipped than his own. But to anyone who has met the small man from Adelaide, it would come as no surprise were it to be a modest laboratory in the City of London that celebrated that first, exhilarating moment of illumination.

http://www.newsweek.com/2014/09/19/digitising-humanity-about-take-another-huge-step-forward-smell-269729.html

Festival of the Mind – Keynote Talk: Together In Electric Dreams – Adults Only Lecture Will Explore “Digital Intimacy”

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FOTM

  • “Multi-sensory” communication will enable physical contact with people online
  • New technologies will allow us to send physical sensations such as taste, touch and smell through the internet

Text messages signed off with a “x” will soon be replaced by the sensation of the real thing and it will soon be possible to hug someone on the other side of the world through the development of “telepresence” technologies which will blend the virtual and the physical and may even result in sexual and emotional relationships between humans and robots, according to a talk Adrian Cheok will give as part of the University of Sheffield’s X Lecture series this September.

Speaking at the X Lectures on Sunday September 21, Professor Adrian Cheok of City University London will explain how we will soon experience taste, touch and smell through the internet and how “telepresence” technologies will allow us to physically interact with people anywhere in the world.

The adult-only lecture series, the X Lectures, are part of the University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind. The 11-day long Festival of the Mind (18th- 28th September 2014) will see the University of Sheffield team its leading academics with the UK’s most famous artists and musicians in order to bring academia to the streets. The X Lectures will focus on themes of reproduction in animals and in humans. Four experts in different areas will give lectures including Professor Tim Birkhead, Professor Mike Siva Jothy, and Dr Allan Pacey all from the University of Sheffield and Adrian Cheok from City University, London.

In his X Lecture, Adrian Cheok will explain how we have long been able to reproduce audio-visual information using computers, but soon all five senses will be stimulated through multi-sensory communication technologies, meaning the information superhighway will become the experiential superhighway as we move from mere information into fully immersive physical experiences.

Professor Adrian Cheok, City University London, said: “Non-verbal communication plays a huge role in our face-to-face interactions but we haven’t yet been able to replicate this experience through technology. We now believe that we are on the verge of developing new ways combining physical and digital information, changing the nature of online communication forever.”

Adrian Cheok is chair Professor of Pervasive Computing at City University London. He is the founder and director of the Mixed Reality Lab in Singapore. His areas of research include mixed reality, human-computer interfaces, wearable computers and ubiquitous computing.

Adrian Cheok’s X Lecture will take place at 8pm on Sunday September 21 at the Festival of the Mind’s Spiegeltent in Barker’s Pool, Sheffield.

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Festival of the Mind

Festival of the Mind will showcase ground-breaking collaborations between leading academics from the University of Sheffield and local people in the creative and cultural industries, at venues across the city.

Events take place between 18–28 September 2014. For further information and the full programme, visit: http://festivalofthemind.group.shef.ac.uk/

Follow Festival of the Mind on Twitter @FestivalMind #FestivalMind or visit our Facebook page.

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Universities Week 2014: Text a hug or send a smell

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By Ellie Buchdahl9 June 2014

Nothing says ‘welcome home’ like the warm smell of freshly baked bread, does it? And nothing says ‘I love you’ better than a big, tight squeeze from a friend.

So wouldn’t it be great to be able to send hugs and scented wishes across the world as easily as a phone call, a text message or an email?

Thanks to work involving students at City University in London, now you can.

Visitors to the Multi-Sensory Internet stand at the Natural History Museum during Universities Week will be able to try on a ring that gives them a ‘remote hug’, get a shot of flavour from a ‘digital lollipop’, or sniff a ‘Scentee’ device – a phone that transmits smells including strawberry, lavender and coffee.

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Want a hug? Professor Adrian David Cheok demonstrates the RingU device that sends virtual cuddles

Academic, apprentice and entrepreneur

Jordan Tewell, from Ohio in the USA, is on a team of international and UK students working with entrepreneur Adrian David Cheok, Professor of Pervasive Computing at City University, to create these ‘sense-sending’ devices.

Jordan’s PhD in Computer Science sounds more like a full-blown apprenticeship in entrepreneurism and networking than a programming project.

‘My day-to-day work really depends on Adrian’s schedule,’ Jordan says.

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‘Usually we’ll run some tests, experiments or demonstrations in the lab, but we have regular outings to events at The Hangout, which is a space set up between the university and local entrepreneurs from London’s Tech City to let students learn entrepreneurship skills and give them a chance to attract investment in their ideas.

‘I also go along with Adrian to companies to make professional pitches for products he’s marketing.

‘We recently took the Scentee to a major multinational consumer products company, and they’re going to use it in a promotional campaign for antiperspirant.’

Professor Cheok and his gadgets are well known in the advertising world.

He has worked with the Michelin-starred restaurant Mugaritz in Spain to develop a mobile app that recreates some of chef Andoni Luis Aduriz’s top dishes. He also worked with a Japanese company to produce a campaign in the USA with meat manufacturer Oscar Mayer, developing a mobile phone ‘alarm clock’ that wakes people with the smell and sound of bacon cooking via the Scentee.

But the input of the PhD students at City is invaluable to his work.

‘My background was computer science,’ says Jordan. ‘Adrian is a real gadget guru, but I’ve brought in my skill set in programming.’

International experience

‘One of the best things about doing this project is working with an interdisciplinary team,’ Jordan adds.

‘There are businessmen, designers in other technical areas, programmers – and it’s incredibly international, too, which was another reason why I wanted to come to the UK.’

One of Jordan’s jobs is to convert the engineer’s perspective of technical drawings and product requirements into simpler picture guides.

These are used by designers based in Japan, and Jordan’s task involves negotiating a language barrier.

‘It’s one of the realities of the industry, and I’m now used to boiling down every nook and cranny of what I do into a format that someone who doesn’t speak excellent English can understand,’ he says. ‘It’s prepared me for anything down the road.’

So how do these virtual tastes actually work?

It’s all down to chemicals and currents, apparently.

The Scentee is loaded with reservoirs of alcohol-based solutions that mimic ‘coffee’ or ‘roses’, for example, but that linger longer than the ‘real’ smells would.

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Sweet science: A taste radio with silver electrodes that go into the mouth to stimulate certain taste sensations on the tongue

Other devices, such as a taste radio, have an apparatus that can be placed in the mouth to stimulate sweet or salt-detecting neurons on the tongue using harmless bursts of electricity.

The research that underpins these devices could have practical medical applications as well as commercial ones, such as ‘recreating’ taste for people with mouth or tongue disorders, or inducing sweet tastes for people with diabetes.

With studies showing that taste and memory are intrinsically linked, there is also potential for memory-aiding devices that go beyond the verbal and visual – to prompt people with Alzheimer’s disease to take medication, for example.

‘This is creating a whole language of taste that can be used in a scientific way, and it’s opening up a completely new area of molecular gastronomy,’ Jordan says. ‘We could even create tastes that you wouldn’t experience in the real world.

‘We are working on cutting-edge stuff here, and in a couple of years we could be building businesses out of it,’ Jordan adds.

‘This is a great opportunity – and a real chance to network and show the world what we’ve created.’

3fbrQzV
Gastronomy guinea pig: Celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal puts one of the devices through its paces

http://www.educationuk.org/global/articles/city-university-students-create-gadgets-to-text-hugs-and-send-smells/

Sending smells by text and other things you didn’t know about UK research

posted in: Media

titlepiece

University researchers tell us about their groundbreaking research – and why they want the public to know about it

Over 250 events took place in UK universities last week to celebrate Universities Week – a five-day festivity where researchers leave the labs to share their work with the public. Now in its fourth year, the main event – and the biggest yet – took place at the Natural History Museum.

• As we launch our new hub on the Impact of Research, I speak to some of the researchers involved about why the public should be interested in their work.

•The vice-chancellor of the University of Surrey and head of Universities UK outline the challenges faced by researchers and their focus for the future.

big_thumbnail
City University staff modelling the Scentee app, ‘digital lollypop’…and some lemons. Photograph: City University

 

Adrian David Cheok, professor of pervasive computing at City University, London, featuring the phone that wakes you up to the smell of bacon

Tell me about your research
“We are trying to bring all the five senses to the internet, so we can transmit and communicate in a multisensory way.”

OK, so how does it work?
“We have a device called Scentee which you attach to your mobile phone. What it does is emit a puff of scent, such as bacon, coffee or lavender, (using chemical cartridges) when you send someone a text message. We have similar devices to produce taste using only electrical current. So if you’re cooking, you can send the taste and smell of your cooking to all of your Facebook friends. We are also looking at touch technology, making devices like RingU, where you connect your ring to the internet via your mobile phone. You can be thinking of your friend, who might be anywhere in the world, and squeeze your ring and they will then get a squeeze on their finger.”

Why should the public be interested in your research?
“Currently the internet is very much about audio and visual communication. But the sense of touch, taste and smell are very important in our physical communication – these senses are connected to the limbic system of the brain which is responsible for emotion and memory. So when you’re chatting online or Skyping, you actually lose a lot of the human emotion. We want to bring these senses to the internet so in the future you will be able to have a sense of presence.”

What are the challenges you face?
“There’s a saying that in the 21st century the most valuable research is time, because now with the internet we basically have infinite information. Yes, time and funding are very important, but you need to have some creativity. You need to have students who are willing to not do incremental work, but what I call quantum step work. In the atom the electrons will fly around in the one band, but that is incremental work. What you need to do is jump to the next quantum gap. We need to have young people who will become scientists and engineers, but it’s really great during education if they are exposed to the creative arts and other fields so they can understand creativity and design.

“We have to remove the barrier between academia and the public, and if you don’t, it is the universities that are going to suffer, because knowledge is going to become more and more free – and you are seeing this now with things like Ted talks. Universities and researchers have to keep up with the internet age and that’s very important to survive in the 21st century.”

What excites you about research?
“I want to invent completely new technology and push the barrier of knowledge. People might think it is really wacky or crazy at the time, but then when you can show them that it really works, you can get a lot of very positive feedback. The most important thing to do is to be totally original.”

http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/jun/16/why-public-should-care-about-uk-research

City’s Circus for the Senses wows audiences at Natural History Museum

posted in: Media

Research showcased as part of Universities Week

13 June 2014

How do you share the taste of your favourite meal or send a scent over the internet? Visitors to the Natural History Museum this week had the chance to find out at City’s Circus for the Senses.big_thumbnail

Held as part of Universities Week, City’s stand showcased the ground-breaking work of Adrian Cheok, Professor of Pervasive Computing, accompanied by his PhD students Marius Braun and Jordan Tewell.

More than 850 people visited the stand to get a feel and taste of the brave new world of the multi-sensory internet. It featured the Scentee device which connects to a smartphone and emits the smell of your favourite scent – be that a virtual bouquet of flowers or the smell of bacon to wake you up in the morning. Also on display were the first ever telehug ring and a digitally actuated lollipop to stimulate the taste buds with salty, sweet and sour flavours.

big_thumbnail (1)Professor Cheok, from City’s School of Mathematics, Computer Science & Engineering, is the founder and director of the Mixed Reality Lab. His research covers human-computer interfaces, wearable computers and ubiquitous computing.

Speaking about the exhibition Professor Cheok said: “It was great to have so many people young and old, from all walks of life, try our demonstrations, and ask detailed questions. Our research is all about human-computer interaction, so being able to hear visitors’ feedback about our inventions was brilliant. People were so interested they even enquired how can they study at City University London!”

See Adrian explain his demonstrations to the media.

This year’s Universities Week saw the Natural History Museum host some of the most cutting-edge research from the UK’s universities, highlighting how university research is helping to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges.

City was also recognised for its work in public engagement. Researchers from the School of Health Scienceswon the Health and Wellbeing award in the national Engage Competition, run by the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE).

Recognised for successfully developing community engagement and collaborative working in mental health nursing research, SUGAR (Service User and Carer Group Advising on Research) – which is facilitated by Professor Alan Simpson from the School of Health Sciences – was the winning project from over 230 entries.

http://www.city.ac.uk/news/2014/jun/citys-circus-for-the-senses-wows-audiences-at-natural-history-museum

Professor Adrian David Cheok elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts

posted in: Media

RSA

Professor of Pervasive Computing, Professor Adrian Cheok, is honoured at becoming a new Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA)

Professor Adrian David Cheok, chair Professor of Pervasive Computing at City University London, has been elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA).

Royal-Society1The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) is an enlightenment organisation which is committed to finding innovative practical solutions to today’s social challenges. Through its ideas, research and 27,000-strong Fellowship, it seeks to understand and enhance human capability so we can close the gap between today’s reality and people’s hopes for a better world. Based in London and founded in 1754, the RSA was granted a Royal Charter in 1847 and the right to use the term Royal in its name by King Edward VII in 1908.

The RSA Fellowship is a network of people from a wide range of backgrounds, united by a desire to build a better society. There are over 27,000 Fellows in more than 80 countries, working together for the benefit of their communities. The RSA supports Fellows in developing local networks and initiatives and through RSA Catalyst programme it provides money and expertise to Fellow-led ideas that aim to have a positive social impact. Fellows elected to the Fellowship must have demonstrated significant achievement to the arts, manufactures and commerce. They come from various backgrounds and are social leaders in their respective areas.

Through his Mixed Reality Lab, (http://mixedrealitylab.org/) Professor Cheok explores mixed reality, human-computer interfaces, wearable computers and ubiquitous computing, fuzzy systems, embedded systems and power electronics. Professor Cheok and his colleagues are actively researching in the field of ’empathetic communication’, by digitally conveying smell and touch.

Reacting to news of his Fellowship, Professor Cheok said:

“Being elected a Fellow of the RSA is without doubt an honour for both myself and City. It is even more of an honour to join a highly respected society whose past members and present members include Charles Dickens, Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, Karl Marx, William Hogarth, John Diefenbaker, Stephen Hawking and Tim Berners-Lee and is committed to finding innovative and practical solutions to today’s social challenges. Further to this, my election to the RSA falls in line with the goals of City in making a real impact on business and the professions.”

For further information on the RSA please visit http://www.thersa.org

Interview at Monocle 24 Radio Station – The Entrepreneurs

posted in: Media

Monocle_24

http://monocle.com/radio/shows/the-entrepreneurs/

This episode: We visit a family farm in northern Greece, talk future tech with Adrian David Cheok of the Mixed Reality Lab, explore the US craft-beer movement with Steve Hindy of Brooklyn Brewery, discuss branding with Jeanette Pritchard, look at watchmaking in Australia, and try to predict the future of Burberry with the team at Winkreative.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/160031913″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

Sending smells by text and other things you didn’t know about UK research

posted in: Media

titlepiece

Article in the Guardian Newspaper

University researchers tell us about their groundbreaking research – and why they want the public to know about it
    • Over 250 events took place in UK universities last week to celebrate Universities Week – a five-day festivity where researchers leave the labs to share their work with the public. Now in its fourth year, the main event – and the biggest yet – took place at the Natural History Museum.

The researchers

Scentee app

City University staff modelling the Scentee app, ‘digital lollypop’…and some lemons. Photograph: City University

Adrian David Cheok, professor of pervasive computing at City University, London, featuring the phone that wakes you up to the smell of bacon

Tell me about your research
“We are trying to bring all the five senses to the internet, so we can transmit and communicate in a multisensory way.”

OK, so how does it work?
“We have a device called Scentee which you attach to your mobile phone. What it does is emit a puff of scent, such as bacon, coffee or lavender, (using chemical cartridges) when you send someone a text message. We have similar devices to produce taste using only electrical current. So if you’re cooking, you can send the taste and smell of your cooking to all of your Facebook friends. We are also looking at touch technology, making devices like RingU, where you connect your ring to the internet via your mobile phone. You can be thinking of your friend, who might be anywhere in the world, and squeeze your ring and they will then get a squeeze on their finger.”

Why should the public be interested in your research?
“Currently the internet is very much about audio and visual communication. But the sense of touch, taste and smell are very important in our physical communication – these senses are connected to the limbic system of the brain which is responsible for emotion and memory. So when you’re chatting online or Skyping, you actually lose a lot of the human emotion. We want to bring these senses to the internet so in the future you will be able to have a sense of presence.”

What are the challenges you face?
“There’s a saying that in the 21st century the most valuable research is time, because now with the internet we basically have infinite information. Yes, time and funding are very important, but you need to have some creativity. You need to have students who are willing to not do incremental work, but what I call quantum step work. In the atom the electrons will fly around in the one band, but that is incremental work. What you need to do is jump to the next quantum gap. We need to have young people who will become scientists and engineers, but it’s really great during education if they are exposed to the creative arts and other fields so they can understand creativity and design.

“We have to remove the barrier between academia and the public, and if you don’t, it is the universities that are going to suffer, because knowledge is going to become more and more free – and you are seeing this now with things like Ted talks. Universities and researchers have to keep up with the internet age and that’s very important to survive in the 21st century.”

What excites you about research?
“I want to invent completely new technology and push the barrier of knowledge. People might think it is really wacky or crazy at the time, but then when you can show them that it really works, you can get a lot of very positive feedback. The most important thing to do is to be totally original.”

New digital smell technology transforms smartphones into smell-o-phones

posted in: Media

cbsnews

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-digital-smell-technology-transforms-smartphones-into-smell-o-phones/

By ALPHONSO VAN MARSH, CBS NEWS

April 1, 2014

When communicating online, words sometimes just aren’t enough, says City University London Professor Adrian David Cheok.

Now, he has a solution: researchers at his Mixed Reality Lab on campus are coming up with ways to say it with a smell — developing cell phone apps and plug-ins that emit scents like flowers, food and spices, if this ever comes to life, it will definitely be one of the greatest marketing techniques, this website will tell you more about this.

“Smell is a very powerful, powerful sense. It can trigger an emotion or memory at a subconscious level — before we logically think about it,” Cheok tells CBS News.

The lab has already created technology able to send the smell of flowers to a loved one via text — provided the recipient has a special digital device plugged into the earphone jack of their smartphone.

The first application of this technology was the Hana Yakiniku plug-in released in Japan last year. It became available internationally on Amazon in February. The video marketing the Hana Yakiniku attachment presents hilarious digital smell solutions to common problems: the poor college student, for example, who can now dine with his iPhone and sniff beef-scented cartridges of the meat he can’t afford, while eating plain rice for lunch.

The plug in sells for about $35. Refill cartridges come in scents like lavender, coffee, and rosemary — oddly, though, there are no refills for the scent of meat, as advertised in the video. The refills cost about $5.

The technology can be used in a range of commercial applications, from diet programs, advertising and health care, to cooking recipes and personal communications.

“You can send someone a Facebook message, but instead of just putting you are ‘feeling happy,’ you’ll also have the floral smell,” Cheok says.

“For our everyday communication, we want to be able to have a much wider range of experiences being transmitted. Not just sending data, not just sending information — we want to share our experiences,” he adds.

Kraft Food’s Oscar Mayer brand is embracing new smell technology. Its Wake Up & Smell The Bacon internet campaign and giveaway of bacon-scented iPhone plug-ins is going viral. The dream-scape concept video features a woman waking up to the smell of bacon wafting from the device, which can be set to go off with an iPhone’s alarm clock. The official YouTube video racked up more than a half-a-million hits in less than a month.

“People never get tired of bacon,” says Tom Bick, Sr. Director of Integrated Marketing and Advertising for Oscar Mayer. “[We’re] thrilled…to give bacon aficionados a new reason to welcome their morning alarm clocks.”

Oscar Mayer says they’ve received more than 148,000 applications online to receive one of “a few thousand” free plug-in bacon-scent cartridges, which are good for about 100 uses.

When CBS News informally surveyed Londoners, showing them the floral-scented plug-in device attached to an iPhone, reviews were mixed.

“First I thought it was a microphone, because it kind of looks like one. But yeah, it does smell a bit like air freshener,” said Dario Medina, a student from Spain.

But Londoners Gaya Pathma and Allen Koshy seem more impressed by the technology involved than by the smell.

“Just because it is new and different right now, it might be just weird at the moment,” says Koshy. “But once it becomes a trend or something, it will be just fine.”

“It is a scent coming out of a phone. It was a bit scary, but really nice,” Pathma says.

Follow Alphonso Van Marsh on Twitter: @AlphonsoVM

© 2014 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Smell the Coffee with the Next Wave of the Internet

posted in: Media

http://newsroom.cisco.com/feature-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1402898

, April 07 , 2014

Will touch, smell and taste be part of the Internet of Everything experience? The ‘pervasive computing’ department of a UK university recently launched a mobile app capable of transmitting aromas remotely, paving the way for a new era of multi-sensory digital communications.

chatperf

Experts have plenty of ideas about what will constitute the next wave of the Internet and mobile communications. But in the ‘Pervasive Computing’ department of City University London  in the UK, Professor Adrian Cheok and his team are certain this will involve a fuller sensory experience – involving smell, taste and touch.

It is a future that is already starting to take shape. In late January, Professor Cheok took his department’s technology to the world-renowned Madrid Fusion culinary festival in Spain, where he unveiled a mobile device and app combination – Scentee – which is capable of emitting food flavors. The technology, developed with a partner in Japan, is believed to be a world first.

Because of the context of the launch, the emphasis at the Madrid festival was the potential for chefs to showcase more of what they do to potential customers – above and beyond photos of their dishes which rarely do their creations justice. But Cheok notes that this is just a glimpse of what’s possible.

‘Wish you were here’

Cheok’s background is in augmented reality – the type of technology we’re seeing now in innovations such as Google Glass. But to achieve a rich simulated reality you need to go beyond audio-visual media, he says. This is also the next area of potential for the Internet, he claims.

“Smell, taste and touch are important means of communication,” Cheok explains. “As we move beyond the ‘information age’ to an era of sharing experiences, what we want to do is give others more of a sense of ‘being there’.”

That means being able to smell the coffee, taste the ice-cream, and feel the touch of another person. Cheok’s innovations include ‘huggable pajamas’, “so parents/grandparents and kids can feel each other’s presence from opposite sides of the world via the Internet,” he explains. A more practical, scaled-down version of this is a wearable ring – RingU – that can remotely transmit a squeeze to a loved one’s hand (via a Bluetooth 4.0 connection to a smartphone). “Touch is so important for communication, and for times when you can’t take a call, receiving a reassuring squeeze via the fingers can mean a lot.” Remote ‘kissing’ applications are further areas of exploration.

Taste and smell, meanwhile, are important because they are attached to the limbic system and associated parts of the brain that are responsible for emotion, mood and memory. The ability to simulate these sensory experiences at distance has great potential in all sorts of applications, from in-store advertising (for example, assigning wafts of scent to frozen food aisles – of what a product would smell like when cooked), to the use of smell as a memory trigger (with potential use for Alzheimer’s patients, and so on).

Emotionally wired

So how does it all work? At this stage the technology is pretty crude, but undoubtedly this will be refined in future iterations, once the mechanics have been perfected.

In a taste scenario, a device with electrodes is used to stimulate taste neurons and taste sensations on the tongue, activated by digitized information sent over the Internet (as chemicals themselves can’t be transmitted). Smell, which continues to be a work in progress, is the subject of similar projects, this time applying magnetic fields to the back of the mouth to stimulate the olfactory receptor, again without chemicals. In the case of Scentee, the smelling device is a bit like an inkjet printer, containing sachets of scents, triggered by a smartphone app.

Cheok sees potential for a fuller sensory experience in TV, cinema and art as well as ‘emotional’ advertising, medical applications, and remote interpersonal communications. The gaming world will undoubtedly be keen to embrace it too – creating even deeper immersion experiences where players are able to smell the burning rubber during a car chase.

He says his university department in the UK is one of only a few groups of computer scientists globally to be looking seriously at multi-sensory media today. The City University London Pervasive Computing faculty combines several disciplines, from electrical engineering (Cheok’s background), to neuroscience.

Cheok has connections to a team in Japan which is doing related work. In particular, a professor in Tokyo is working on new kitchen utensils that can alter the taste of food, for example to artificially make a dish appear sweeter or saltier – without the need to add the actual ingredient. With growing pressure on families and food producers to reduce levels of sugar and salt, this could be a development with both positive health implications and considerable commercial mileage.

Used with the permission of http://thenetwork.cisco.com/.

Sensory hacking: perfume-infused dreams and virtual intimacy

posted in: Media

wired_logo

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-03/31/touch-taste-and-smell-technology

31 MARCH 14 by KATIE COLLINS

Augmented reality is yesterday’s news. Wired.co.uk takes an in-depth look at some of the developing technology designed to virtually stimulate all five senses

bullipedia-4

“It’s very strong,” I’m warned, but it is already too late — the sour taste of lemons has hit and I’m reminded instantly of how I never could finish those Toxic Waste sweets. My tongue, which is wedged between two metal sensors, cannot bear it for more than a few seconds even now.

I pull off the electrodes and the sensation vanishes. By passing an electrical current through my tongue, they had temporarily tricked my taste receptors into experiencing a sour taste. Varying the frequency of the current allows the electrodes to also simulate other tastes — sweet, salt and bitter.

Wired.co.uk first saw this taste actuator device when it part of a shortlisted proposal for Ferran Adrià’s Hacking Bullipedia competition. The proposal, put together by Professor Adrian Cheok, founder and director of Singapore’s Mixed Reality Lab, didn’t win the competition, but one of the other main elements of Cheok’s proposal has already successfully been made into a commercial product.

scentee_1

The Scentee is a module that can be attached to the bottom of a smartphone and emits puff of scent using chemical cartridges. It simply slots into the phone’s headphone jack and works in conjunction with an app. The basic idea behind it is that you can send aromas over the internet, although the technology is increasingly being appropriated as a marketing tool.

MICHELIN-STAR ODOURS

While the Scentee may have failed to win favour with Ferran Adrià, that doesn’t mean there’s no place for it in the world of fine dining. In one commercial project the device, along with a dedicated app, is being used to create a pre-dinner treat for customers of the Michelin-starred Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Spain, which is currently listed as the fourth best restaurant in the world.

Mugaritz’s head chef, who trained under Adrià at El Bulli, is using the Scentee to connect with customers who might make bookings several months in advance, by giving them a small taste (or whiff) of what to expect from one of his dishes beforehand.

mugaritz

“It’s basically very simple, they give you different kinds of seeds in this bowl and you grind it and it’s multisensory — the sound, the smell, the vision — and the taste of course — so finally you drink it,” explains Cheok.

The Mugaritz team created an app that they will tell diners to download when they send them the Scentee device. The app recreates virtually the experience of crushing the seeds in a pestle and mortar, allowing the user to experience the sound and smell of making the dish. Holding the phone horizontal, Cheok demos the app, which allows for a partial view inside a mortar. As the phone — which acts as the pestle — is gently moved around using a stirring action however, more of the mortar is shown and seeds drop into the bowl with a tinkle.

“That’s the actual sound they recorded from the mortar,” he says, as it rings gently. After gently rotating the phone for a while, the Scentee device emits puffs of pepper, sesame and saffron, all of which were also created in the restaurant’s kitchen. “What he’s saying is that he wants to share the experience of the restaurant even before you go there.

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE BACON

The Scentee is also being used more widely in advertising campaigns, including on television. One particular campaign in the US has seen bacon company Oscar Meyer make a thousand or so bacon capsule, which it is sending out with Scentees to competition winners, with the promises they can wake up to the smell of fresh bacon as their phone goes off in the morning.

While there is nothing else quite like the Scentee available on the market, the chemical stimulation of smell is not in itself particularly new idea. At the moment, however, Cheok is planning to use his previous work using the Scentee and the taste actuator to help him try and build an element that will be able to stimulate smell electronically.

“If we can do it, I think it would be the first time anyone makes an artificial smell sensation,” says Cheok. It’s a tricky task because of where the olfactory bulb — the neural structure that perceives odours — sits in the brain. It’s tucked right at the back of the nasal cavity and is very soft and spongy, which would make it hard to attach electrodes to even if it could be reached. Instead, Cheok has something completely non-invasive in mind.

“We will put a magnetic coil at the back of the mouth — so maybe something like a dental guard you can wear — and because the olfactory bulb is quite close to the palatine bone, we can use time-varying magnetic fields to produce electrical currents in the olfactory bulbs. That will then produce artificial smell simulation, similar to the taste,” he explains.

“Using this technique, we can also produce the more complicated smells so because you know our tongue is only the basic five tastes — sour, salty, sweet, bitter and umami — everything else which is actually flavour is from our nasal cavity, so when we develop this it’ll be much more complicated.”

This is the research Cheok is currently undertaking at his lab at City University in London where he is professor of pervasive computing. While he’s not sure actually sure what kind of product it might become a part of yet, he says he confident that “something will come along”. “Sometimes you have to push the barriers of science and then people will come up with their own application.”

Cheok has been based at City University for under a year, before which he was based at Keio University in Japan and the National University of Singapore. He first became interested in the kind of simulating touch, smell and taste when he was working on a project to build an augmented reality toolkit about ten years ago. While it was groundbreaking at the time, he quickly realised it was stimulating only one of our senses, despite all the available data and potential for communication across multiple channels. “So that’s basically the motivation,” he says. “Can we go from the age of information to the age of experience?”

THE AGE OF VIRTUAL INTIMACY

“You can have a virtual animal there — a 3D dog or something — but people always wanted to touch it, it’s just a natural reaction. When you see objects, touching is a very important part of how we explore the world, so I realised we had to go beyond just augmenting our vision and we should also try to augment all of the five senses. More and more of our communication now is done online, but online we still can’t get the sense of presence we have in the physical world,” said Cheok.

This started him working on replicating touch. He kicked off his research by developing ways for people to overcome the difficulties of interacting with their pets from a distance (“it’s very hard to make a telephone call, because we can’t speak to animals yet”), by creating a squeezable doll that would trigger pressure actuators on the animal’s body.

This research morphed into a project called the Huggy Pajama, which was designed to allow similar communication between parents and toddlers wearing haptic jackets. The concept has now been turned into a commercial product that’s specifically designed to help give comfort to children with autism who have difficulty with human-to-human contact.

Cheok along with his colleagues at the National University in Singapore conducted research into the emotional impact of this kind of touch, publishing a paper in 2008 entitledSqueeze me, but don’t tease me, which concluded that “touch seems to be a special sensory signal that influences recipients in the absence of conscious reflection and that promotes prosocial behaviour”.

It’s already a well-known phenomenon that if you’re being touched by another human while watching a horror film, you have a decreased fear response, but the team’s research showed that touch using virtual devices provoked an almost identical decrease in fear response.

“Similar to taste and smell, touch has a different part of the brain processing the haptic sensation than audiovisual. So it’s not like if you just write ‘hug’ in your email — it’s definitely different actually really hugging, because it’s a different part of your brain which is actuated when you’re doing the hug. Having this actual touch sensation does produce a different response.”

ringu-3

Of course there are many different potential applications here for consumer products too. Cheok and his small team at City are currently working hard to meet their deadline on the RingU, a piece of jewellery that transmits a haptic vibration to the wearer of a paired ring when the silicon gem on the top is pressed. Three tiny LEDs, smaller than pin heads will also cause the ring to glow gently when the ‘hug’ is transmitted. The finished product is due to launch in Japan and Korea first, and then will eventually be available in the UK as well.

ringu-2_1

ringu

As well as being a standalone consumer product used for long-distance personal communication, Cheok envisages that the RingU will be branded by bands, who will then be able to communicate with teenage fans at concerts in a similar way to Xylobands. “Of course one pop star can’t hug a million fans, but this way we can have a virtual hug and so fans will like that — a different kind of connection.

“With vision and sound it is omni-directional, so you can go to a concert and hundreds of thousands of people can hear the music, but with touch it’s very limited, it’s very intimate,” he adds.

Speaking of intimate, Cheok is also currently working on the latest version of the Kissenger, a device that allows people to send kiss messages over the internet. Wired.co.uk first reported on the product when it involved kissing spherical robotic pigs, but the new iteration will look very different (and, thankfully, not at all like an animal). Users will attach a module to the bottom of their smartphones, a little bit like the Scentee, and will then be able to kiss face-to-face while video calling. The resolution on the module will be much higher, says Cheok, working like a pin image captor in order to provide a very detailed and precise level of feedback.

kissenger

It’s not only whimsical consumer products being developed thanks to the evolving haptic touch technology though. As Cheok points out, there are also a lot of potential applications in related areas like robotics. “Robots need to be able to sense the physical world, especially humanoid robots, and also for example, home robots. It will be carrying grandma to bed or something and so it needs to be able to have very realistic touch.”

Collaboration is not only a vital part of finding applications for the technology, but for understanding the potential scientific benefits of the research. While attempting to create the electrical smell simulator, Cheok will be working alongside a neuroscientist from the University of Marseille to discover more about the actual areas of the brain that are being stimulated when people experience electrical tastes and smells, compared to those being stimulated when they experience the real deal.

lemon

“For example, this,” says Cheok gesturing to the taste actuator, “allows taste perception of sour, but we’re not really sure yet whether it stimulates the same parts of the brain as the real sour, so we’re going to do these experiments and compare.” They will study the brain signals they observe from people using the smell and taste technology inside an MFRI machine, as well as brain signals from people who have had drops of liquid put on their tongues.

PROGRAMMING DREAMS WITH SMELL

Many of Cheoks biggest hopes and dreams for future research will require closer work with neuroscientists, particularly to test the technology as widely as possible across potential areas for application, including mental health. Even though he could potentially pursue the entrepreneurship opportunities his research opens up, his ambitions lie in pushing the boundaries of science.

“I’ve been thinking for a few years now, can we interface with people when they’re sleeping? So much of computer technology is focused on the conscious communication, but a lot of communication is subconscious.”

dreamcatcher

Cheok has been inspired to pursue this idea further by a piece of recent research that discovered people could be taught to remember aromas they had smelt for the first time when they were asleep. After exposing test subjects to smells while sleeping, they were then put in a magnetic imaging machine, which could see that when exposed to that same smell again, the area of the brain relating to memory was activated.

“Because smell is connected to emotion, we want to see if we can programme people’s dreams,” states Cheok boldly. “We want to see if we can use these kind of smell devices, for example, to make a happy dream or a fearful dream.” His hope is that this could potentially be used to help treat those who suffer from bad dreams due to post-traumatic stress.

Once they have built the technology, the first step would be to test its effect on the emotion of people who are awake, and then repeat the experiment on people who are asleep. From there, they could go about beginning to work out how people would use it — although, says Cheok, given that most people take their phones to bed with them these days, that should be fairly easy. “You’ve already got a device that’s a computer and can emit a smell… so then you could use this to affect people’s sleep and maybe even new kinds of learning.”

Cheok’s big dreams do not stop there though. His current work relies on finding ways to stimulate the sensors that activate the olfactory bulb and simulate the effects of touch, but ultimately he would like to be able to find a way to bypass the sensors and go to directly to the brain itself.

“This might seem a little bit science fiction now, but already there’s been some work where they can connect the optical fibre to the neuron of an animal,” he says. “That means we can already send some electrical signal from a computer to a neuron and it really won’t take long until we can do this for hundreds and thousands of neurons. Eventually I think we’re going to see in our lifetime some direct brain interface and that will be probably the next stage of this research.”

This moonshot strategy might seem overly ambitious, but it’s worked for Cheok before and he believes he will again. “What I always say to students is do research that is a quantum step, not just incremental,” he says. “We’re not always successful, because sometimes you can’t get a thing to work.. but that’s what we’re aiming for.”

 

Interview on CNN: Forget text messaging, the ‘oPhone’ lets you send smells

posted in: Media

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http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/17/tech/innovation/the-ophone-phone-lets-you-send-smells/

By Kieron Monks for CNN

March 17, 2014

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Already on the market is the Scentee plug-in. It allows a smartphone user to attach a small device to their phone and receive “smell notifications” when a message arrives.
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Currently, each device can only emit one smell at a time: “Right now it’s the equivalent of music before MP3s,” says augmented reality professor Adrian Cheok. “You had to record a song on a tape and physically give it someone.”
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Dr Cheok (right) is hoping to change this. Alongside chef Andoni Luis Aduriz, he presented the “world’s first digital smell app” at the Madrid Fusion 2014 food festival.
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The device contains magnetic coils that send electric signals into the brain’s olfactory bulb to simulate the effect of smell. Cheok hopes to have a prototype available within two years.

(CNN) — Holiday albums could be less forgettable when pictures of a Mediterranean meal carry the scent of olives; a selfie on the beach contains a trace of salt spray or a rainy London scene conveys the distinctive aroma of freshly wet concrete.

If the digital age has increased the volume of communication, it may not have improved the quality. Reversing that trend is the goal of a new generation of sensory engineers who are going beyond sight and sound to produce devices that use our untapped faculties. Perhaps the most exciting breakthroughs right now are arriving in the form of smell-centered communication.

“Our motto is ‘aroma tells a thousand pictures'”, says Dr. David Edwards, biomedical engineer at Harvard and founder of Le Laboratoire, known for producing radical sensory devices such as calorie-free chocolate spray. Every human has thousands of distinct smell sensors, Edwards explains, a resource he taps with his newest invention the oPhone.

Set for a beta launch in July, this phone offers the most sophisticated smell messaging yet created. In collaboration with Paris perfumers Givaudan and baristas Café Coutume, Edwards has created a menu of scents, contained in ‘Ochips’. MIT electrical engineer Eyal Shahar designed containers for them that release when heated by the touch of a button, but cool quickly to keep smells distinct and localized, a historic difficulty with the much-mocked smell-o-vision experiments in cinema.

Mix and match

The oPhone user can mix and match aromas and then send their composition as a message, which will be recreated on a fellow user’s device. Up to 356 combinations will be possible in the first wave, rising to several thousand in the next year, and the dream is an exhaustive base — the ‘universal chip’.

“Biologically we respond powerfully to aroma, so if we become familiar with the design of aromatic communication we might be able to say things we couldn’t before”, says Edwards. He sees the limited aromas of the oPhone as the first letters of a rich new language, that may be used as a basis for novels and symphonies. The faith is grounded on the acknowledged influence of smell on the subconscious, and the potential to learn its secrets.

The first oPhones will be limited to a select community of coffee enthusiasts. But the launch on July 10 will be accompanied by a more inclusive product: the first olfactory social network.

Our motto is ‘aroma tells a thousand pictures’. – Dr. David Edwards

A free app will allow anyone to compose and send a smell note by text or email, based on a set menu of aromas and variations. The message can be received by any normal phone as a text. The recipient can then download the composition from hotspots which will be set up in the launch city of Boston.

“We’re expecting an interest in self-expression and we’re ready to learn with the public”, says Edwards. “We would like to be reactive as new ideas for aromatic vocabularies arise, and to continue providing them for new interests.”

He is betting the public around Boston’s famous technology centers are early adopters, and will take the concept forward. Beyond the city, the network will include a public interface for people to trade tips and recipes, and store them in cloud software. Edwards plans to feature ‘smell emoticons’ and viral stunts, and may offer a mixing deck that allows overlap with music production software.

The concept can benefit from saturation of the current communication market, says trend analyst and editor of ‘Green Futures’ Anna Simpson. “We’re reaching a limit with what we can do with text data, and there is the potential to connect more deeply and personally through smell.”

Simpson also believes a consumer shift toward experience could drive adoption. “There is growing interest from brands in resources for creating richer experiences.

Smelly start-ups

Giants such as Olympus are publishing research, but for now start-ups are taking the initiative. Singapore’s Mixed Reality Lab has been prolific in this space, engineering Japanese device Scentee that allows users to send a single fragrance between them. The company released an app worldwide in February, and has lucrative partnerships such as with Mugaritz restaurant in Spain, that allows for online cooking tutorials with leading chefs to give students a whiff of the smell they are aiming for.

We’re reaching a limit with what we can do with text data, and there is the potential to connect more deeply and personally through smell. – Anna Simpson

“Right now it’s the equivalent of music before mp3s, when you had to record a song on a tape and physically give it someone”, says Dr. Adrian Cheok, founder of the Mixed Reality Lab and professor of pervasive technology at City University, London. “We can send a basic scent through a device like Scentee, but we need the framework to make millions of them available through digitization.”

Cheok is testing a device that would connect us directly to the Internet, inspired by the successful connection of optical fibres to neurons of mice. His lab experiments involve subjects wearing a mouthguard-like device containing magnetic coils, from which electric signals are directed into the olfactory bowl to simulate the effect of smell. The wearer’s brains are scanned before and after to pinpoint the effect, and the results have encouraged Cheok enough to believe a prototype could be available in two years.

A similar technique has already born fruit with a similar design simulating the effects of taste. But taste has just four primary forms — bitter, sweet, salty, sour– whereas smell involves identifying individual molecules with no primary form.

“The most basic smell still has hundreds of molecules and you need analytical chemistry to see what’s there”, says Dr. Joel Mainland of the Monell Chemical Senses Center. “Perhaps only 5% would have an impact on smell, so it’s difficult to pick them out. It’s more trial and error than quantitative science.”

Healthy aroma

Monell are also pursuing the goal of digitizing olfaction, with healthcare applications high on the agenda. One of their research areas is seeking smell biomarkers in cancer patients, using an ‘e-nose’ to hunt chemicals in the blood to deliver early diagnosis. The process was inspired by the ability of dogs to sense sickness, although their smelling ability is multiples higher.

Although this research is still young in the lab, similar technology is already being smartphone-enabled. A NASA-developed chemical sensor has been released to a commercial partner as the basis for mobile applications that could breath-test users. UK Nanotechnology company Owlstone are raising several million dollars in venture capital for a handheld sensor that that could detect a wider range of diseases.

Medical uses are high on the agenda for the burgeoning Digital Olfaction Society, whose upcoming conference will discuss olfaction technology for identifying dangerous gases, guidance for the blind and cognitive aid for Alzheimer’s sufferers. But industries as varied as military, travel, jewellery, food and entertainment will also be represented.

Dr. Cheok believes the ultimate direction of goal is a multi-sensory device unifying all five senses to create an immersive virtual reality, and could be usable within five years. The neglected senses are making up for lost time.

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