Internet of Smells_04Mike Nudelman/Business Insider

"Today we're going to show you the world's first olfactive message."

Harvard professor David Edwards is sitting on the back of a couch at Le Laboratoire, the art and design studio he opened in Paris seven years ago. His casual perch and thick-rimmed glasses make him look more student than teacher, but the thicket of gray in his stubble gives him away.

"So here I have an Android phone and we have an application that's called oNotes," he says to a group of twenty-somethings in cardigans. "Amy, which coffee would you like to smell?"

Amy Yin, a Harvard student and Edwards' collaborator, orders espresso. Edwards taps his phone and Yin lifts a small white box to her nose. Two, maybe three seconds pass before she shoots her arm into the air. "I got it!" Yin passes the box to the man next to her. He sniffs. "Yeah, it's good." Pass. Sniff. "Oh wow, it's strong." Pass. Sniff. "Oh delicious."Screen Shot 2014 03 12 at 11.04.37 AMVapor CommunicationsProfessor David Edwards, developer of the oPhone

The device in her hand is the oPhone, which isn't a phone at all. It's a finger-sized plastic cylinder that encases four oChips, each holding four distinct odors captured in wax. "Like ink cartridges for aroma," Edwards says. Those 16 aromas, called oNotes, are the handiwork of an aroma expert who reduced a variety of scents down to their component parts, creating a periodic table of smells. The first oPhones will be able to piece those elements together into hundreds of aromas. Future versions will produce thousands, Edwards says. When the oPhone goes on sale later this year, users will be able to send those scents via a mobile app, which will also host a social network enabling users to share personalized aromas. Think of it as an Instagram for smells.

"There's something unique in our perception of aroma, in what it does to us psychologically, that’s part of being alive," Edwards tells me. He hopes to harness that power, allowing individuals and businesses to utilize and deploy scents across geographic boundaries in much the way telephones did for speech and television for images. Such technology, he expects, will foster a "sophisticated aromatic vocabulary" that makes communicating with odors as natural as using verbal language.Niou ophonez.976Vapor CommunicationsThe oPhone

Say you want to message a co-worker to duck out to lunch. Instead of gchatting "Wanna make a run for the border?" you might send a whiff of a seasoned ground beef followed by a mild bouquet of chalky Pepto Bismol. Imagine a Cinnabon commercial consisting of 28 seconds of dead air accompanied only by the distinct smell of its doughy sugar bombs, followed by the devastating tagline "You know you want it ..." Old Spice could reveal what the hell Matterhorn body wash smells like, right after subjecting you to the odors it’s meant to wash away. You could include personalized scents with your online dating profiles, sniff out favorite new coffees when shopping online.

The bacon-scent alarm clock was just the beginning.

Professor Edwards is merely the latest in a long line of inventors and entrepreneurs who've sniffed around for the holy grail of olfactive technology: devices that elevate the sense of smell to the same lofty perch as sight and sound. After more than a century of rosy starts and rotten flops, Edwards thinks he's solved the puzzle. And he’s not alone.

Classic_rollWikimediaAdvertisers would love to blast you with tempting aromas.

A slew of innovators around the world are exploiting mobile technology and inexpensive hardware in the race to revolutionize the science of scent. The Japanese company ChatPerf already has its Scentee on the market. The bulb-shaped device plugs into a smartphone’s audio jack and emits a single aroma (either rose, rosemary, lavender, coffee or strawberry) on-demand or as a notification. Also in Japan, a group of university scientists developed a TV with four small fans in each corner, allowing users to experience localized scents "as if an odor source had been placed on the screen." In Europe, the Spanish company Olorama is marketing a Wi-Fi-enabled device to theaters, hotels and events agencies that want to "bring aromas to the audiovisual world," and a French doctor has started the Digital Olfaction Society, which held its first conference last year.

The gaming sector, always eager to make the user experience more immersive, is rife with devices that aim to add scent to zombie murder. Most notable are the ScentScape and Game Skunk, which blast aromas synced with on-screen action. Even Microsoft flirted with putting an aroma-emitting device into the Xbox One controller.

Next up: bringing scent to wearable virtual reality systems that already provide immersive visual and audio experiences in the art, therapy and gaming fields.


Dollars and Scents

Naturally, marketers are especially eager to deploy the new technology. In 2012 Dunkin Donuts created a campaign in Seoul that filled city buses with a coffee aroma every time a Dunkin ad played on the loudspeaker. Sales at locations near city bus routes spiked 29%. In December of last year Pop Secret introduced the Pop Dongle, a popcorn-shaped device that plugs into an iPhone's audio jack and oozes a buttery bouquet when playing a Pop Secret-branded game. And of course there’s the aforementioned Oscar Meyer bacon app.

Womans_armpit.JPGWikimediaSome odors prompt a complex response.

Research has consistently shown that scent increases sales, and yet smell remains the most overlooked and underutilized sense. Our visual culture treats odor as a taboo, meant to be scrubbed away or covered up rather than enjoyed for its emotional power. That’s probably got something to do with our inability to control it. We can turn off sights and sounds, but controlling odors isn’t as easy. Aromas seep into our noses whether we like them or not, and quickly, into our brains. They conjure visceral memories, tapping our subconscious in unpredictable ways.

"Smell is very closely tied to emotion," says Stuart Firestein, head of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia. "And the emotions aren’t always good." That could explain our aversion to odor, which is just as likely to make us feel disgust as it is to conjure hidden memories of sharing dessert with an aunt, as they did for Marcel Proust in "Remembrance of Things Past." "The thing to recognize is that the memories are always of an emotional type," Firestein says. "You don't smell something and remember an equation."

There’s a biological explanation for that, says scent scientist Avery Gilbert, author of "What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life." "The olfactory nerves in your nose hit an area in the brain called the amygdala. It's an emotional center of the limbic system, so you get a very fast read on whether you're liking something before you can even think about it," he says. That reaction is a gut-level response that can be universal (we all like floral scents), culturally conditioned (only Swedes like canned fermented herring), or tied to a personal memory.

It’s that untapped power, along with odor’s complete absence from our technological lives, that makes scent technology so appealing. Every person with a functioning nose is a potential customer, and the first innovator who gets this idea right stands to both make a mint and cement a legacy.