Imagine yourself in a movie theater where the main characters of the movie are digging into a lavish spread. Then, suddenly you realize that the delicious smell of the scrumptious roasted chicken is gradually wafting towards you. Wouldn’t that just startle you? The smell-o-vision which was the subject of many jokes till now has just been conceptualized by an entrepreneurial designer. This Utopian concept of any movie clip evoking a sense of smell in us is not so Utopian or imaginary right now.

Portuguese designer has designed his unique concept of blending visual clips with a set of preset aromas or smells. He has named his design SMELLIT. This concept uses 118 aroma cartridges to bring contextual aromas to a viewer’s nose. For example, if you are watching a scene in a movie where the main characters are enjoying pizza then the ‘smell information’ embedded in the DVD playing that particular scene would activate one of the aroma cartridges in SMELLIT. The delicious mouth-watering smell of piping hot cheesy pizza would then waft into your nose with the help of a small on-board fan. Approximately 20 second before a character in a movie starts eating, say, a hot dog, SMELLIT uses digital smell technology also know as DST to start triggering out the smell of hot dogs into the noses of the viewers.

SMELLIT is an amazing concept which has created wide spread interest among gadget lovers round the world. If the olfactory effect is added to the audio visual effects of a film or advertisement, the effect of that movie or advertisement would be much more enticing. However, there is a distinct down side of this concept.

Different Smells trigger out by SMELLIT need not always be appetising or sweet. The 118 cartridges of SMELLIT contain some quite gut wrenching odours too. However, it remains to be seen that how many people volunteer to expose themselves to those not so pleasant or rancid smells that SMELLIT might bellow out in the particularly squeamish scenes of any movie.

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