Why Take A Picture When You Could Capture The Smell Instead

The scent of something can be just as powerful a tool at making you remember something as an image, the smell of flowers or fresh cookies could be all it takes to remind you of a place or person, but what if you could capture those scents, those moments, well now you can, technically.

Amy Radcliffe has created a device she calls the Madeleine, which is in effect a odor camera and it’s similar to devices used by the perfume industry to analyze and recreate odor compounds.

Place an object or smell source into the device and a small pump extracts particles of scent and catches them in a resin trap, where it then records the information captured, this can then be expressed in a graph-like formula, a picture of the smell that has been captured if you will.

The formula can be inscribed on a bronze disk to artificially reproduce the smell, but the complexity and strength of the scent means the process can take anything from a few minutes to a full day.

Could this be the first step to producing a “point-and-shoot” smell camera, likely not but it’s still some impressive technology non the less and it will be interesting to see… I mean smell what applications they can come up with for  the system in the future.

Thank you Mashable for providing us with this information.

Image courtesy of GizMag.