E-Mail Me That Smell, Would You?

A new gadget claims to replicate the world’s odors and disseminate them digitally.

It could also be used to “record” smells in one place (e.g. with a mobile phone), and transmit them elsewhere. To that end, there’s e-commerce marketing potential — helping online shoppers select a perfume, for example.

First they’ve got to shrink the machine down from its current six feet in length.

Japanese scientists came up with the gizmo close on the heels of another Japanese invention that pumps smells into movie theatres.

This whole thing rings a bell. Does anyone out there recall a dot-com boom era product that slipped into a disk drive and created aromas? I know I read that somewhere back then. Let me know in the comments section, please.

via Warren Ellis.