It was the strong unmistakable smell of chocolate being made that originally got me wondering. How long will it be before technology provides a viable product that can be used to accurately record the smell of a time and place for later playback?
With audio and visual recording simply racing to finer resolution, I sincerely hope that some mad inventor is working away feverishly in their garage right now to find a way to easily capture and then repeat smells.
Sure, there are plenty of things that you would never want to smell again (just like there are surely plenty of things that you might rather never hear nor see again), but certainly recollection of the smells of certain places and times could enhance our fond memories.
There are few problems here. First, unlike visual and auditory senses, the olfactory sense is a contact sense. That is, you smell something because the chemicals that make up the smell come in contact with the fibers in the upper surface of your nasal cavity. Second, visual and auditory information is a form of pattern recognition. When you record the light and sound you are interested in the patterns only, and patterns are easily reproduced. With the olfactory sense, you are concerned with actual chemicals. We are left with two options then, to either provide direct stimulation of the olfactory receptors which would be incredibly invasive (i.e. sticking something up your nose or into your brain) or create upon request the chemicals that would appropriately stimulate those receptors which is at least extremely impractical. The same is true with taste and touch also suffers from the contact sense problem.
Of course the easiest way to do all of this is something a kin to jacking into the matrix.
(stupid check box thing)
There’s an app for that: http://mashable.com/2014/06/17/ophone-scented-texts/