It’s easy to assume that most people have at some point wanted to bottle a scent they have smelled by using a device. I mean, wouldn’t it be cool if you could just take a snapshot of a scent and then return back to it whenever you want? It would be the ultimate memory documentation device. It would be like a camera, but with smells. That is what the scent camera is all about. You might be confused about what I’m talking about, but I’ll explain.
It has been proven that scent is the primary and the closest sense connected with memories. That is why when we come across a scent we have previously smelled in our past, our brain instantly triggers a memory. Researcher and super geek Amy Radcliffe was tired of just being able to take pictures and video to save special moments, so she started to work on a scent camera. It might sound weird, but the fact is, even though recording a scent isn’t exactly the easiest of tasks, it’s not exactly an advanced process either. It just takes some skills and some know-how, and you too could be capturing scents.
So far Amy has managed to put together a primitive version of a scent camera that she calls Madeleine. It works similar to a camera, with the exception that it captures scents. Don’t go thinking you can just go around pointing the device at anything that smells since the process is just a tad bit more complex.
It actually works by placing the object containing the scent you want to record under a glass funnel. The funnel is used to suck up the scent or odor and capture it in an odor trap, which records the particles that the scent or odor is made up of. Even though the scent camera may look more like an old school lab kit, Amy envisions we will all be able to record scents, take them to a lab for processing, and get a vial containing the scents along with a bronze disk that contains the exact formulas which make up those particular scents. Now, do I hear a new website called “Scentogram.com” hitting the web soon?
Amy Radcliffe’s Scent Camera Prototype
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