Читать книгу Led by the Nose - Robert Chalmers - Страница 5

“Smell. They are taking our smells away… You don’t know who the hell you are dealing with any more.”

In an interview recorded to mark his birthday, Mel Brooks’ celebrated comic character, the 2,000 Year Old Man^[1], addressed what he considered to be the most worrying development in the modern world. His major concern was not, he explained, related to matters such as world peace or the erosion of individual liberty. “It’s something much more important than that,” he said. “Smell. They are taking our smells away; all of our own individual smells. They have a smell for everything today. Under the arms. Up the nose. In the crotch.” The consequence, he complained, was that “You don’t know who the hell you’re dealing with any more. You can’t tell the difference between men and women. You can’t tell who’s who. And that,” he concluded, “is no way to live.”

The 2,000 Year Old Man was not noted for his insight or perception: he recalled having snubbed such figures as Moses and Jesus (“a thin lad who came into the store but never bought anything”) opting instead to worship “this guy called Phil.” His fears over the pervasiveness of artificial scent, however, are proving to have been a rare moment of prescience.

To most of us, who have long been accustomed to the computerised broadcasting of sound and vision, the idea of transmitting smells digitally still seems absurd. On June 12 1977, viewers of Reports Extra, a late-night BBC show broadcast in Manchester, were shown a large cone fitted with antennae. The presenter introduced the device as a “Raman spectroscope” capable of radiating smell directly into a viewer’s living room through their television set. “A pleasant country smell,” he explained, “not manure.” The station received 172 calls from credulous or intoxicated Mancunians, the great majority asserting that their houses were now agreeably perfumed with the scent of newly-mown hay or grass. Only 16 respondents reported no smell. Two complained that the Raman technology had triggered their hay fever. The success of this experiment in the power of suggestion, conducted by Michael O’Mahony, a Bristol University psychology lecturer, was the more remarkable in that the BBC had broadcast a very similar item as its April Fool’s joke only two years earlier^[2].

And so, when I informed friends that I had just taken delivery of a Scentee – a small device which enables its owner to send or receive aromas telephonically – most naturally assumed it to be another hoax.

The Scentee may not look like much. A miniature plastic globe, or so-called dongle, a little smaller than a cherry tomato, it connects to the audio socket of your smartphone. Download the relevant app, and the device can be activated either independently, by the user, or remotely, when another Scentee owner gives you a call. The dongle glows blue and emits, in a delicate flourish which resembles the vapour from an e-cigarette, the fragrance from whichever chemical cartridge has been loaded into it. Available scents include bacon, short ribs, coffee and buttered potato.

The device was manufactured in Japan, inspired by the research work of Adrian David Cheok. A multi award-winning scientist, formerly head of Singapore’s Mixed Reality Lab, Cheok now has the title of Professor of Pervasive Computing at London’s City University. The Scentee is still a novelty in Britain; during a demonstration given in June, at the capital’s Natural History Museum, many schoolchildren in the audience argued, with some warmth, that UK sales would increase considerably should the professor seek to develop a broader range of fragrances, such as camel fart.

Cheok, 42, meets me at his HQ, a small laboratory in City University’s main building. An engaging and articulate man, dressed all in black, he looks more like a seasoned rock guitarist than a research scientist. He is accompanied by two of his PhD students, German-born Marius Braun and Jordan Tewell, from Ohio.

“I was especially impressed,” I tell Cheok, “when I dialled up the mashed potatoes.” (Hearing myself say this, I can’t help informing the professor that, over the years, I have interviewed one man who has walked on the moon, and another who ate an entire Cessna light aircraft in Venezuela, and still this conversation feels as surreal as any I’ve ever had^[3]). “But what,” I ask him, “is the point of this technology? Is anybody actually using the Scentee?”

“Absolutely they are. Previously I was based at Keio University in Tokyo. We were doing a big project on food media. I was collaborating with a friend, Koki Tsubouchi, who is an entrepreneur. We, as the academics, maintained our focus on the research, while Koki’s company developed a commercial product,” which, he adds, “became the first portable device for producing smell. Scentee,” he adds, “is a profitable company. They sell thousands of units a month in Japan.”

Cheok grew up in Adelaide, where he was born to a Malaysian father and Greek mother. He began his academic life in Australia as an electrical engineer, though it’s difficult to imagine him ever having considered devoting his life to so constricted and orthodox a discipline. You sense in him an unusual confluence of rigour, creative imagination and just a little mischief.

“I can see that this thing is fun,” I tell him. “But is it ever going to be more than a gimmick?”

“Primarily,” he replies, “our work here is concerned with digital sensory communication, which means sending taste, smells and touch to other people anywhere in the world. For instance, you could be watching a cookery show and not only see the food, but smell and taste it at the same time.”

Researcher Marius Braun plays a video which was filmed in the Mugaritz restaurant at Rentería, close to the Basque city of San Sebastian. Andoni Luis Aduriz, head chef at the Mugaritz (currently ranked sixth in the world by the British magazine Restaurant) has been collaborating with the inventors of the Scentee. Aduriz trained under the Catalan master Ferran Adria at El Bulli, the iconic restaurant on the Costa Brava, which elicited reverential reviews until it closed three years ago. Aduriz, like his mentor, is famous for shocking and surprising his clientele with bold and unusual combinations of tastes. Diners are given no advance warning of the menu, whose 20 dishes claim to excite every sense, as well as stimulating emotion and memory.

The video from the Mugaritz shows customers embarking on the traditional first course, which requires each of them to prepare a broth by crushing herbs and spices in a mortar. Armed with a smartphone loaded with the Scentee app, a prospective visitor can simulate the grinding action by rotating a finger on the phone’s display, where an image of the bowl appears. As the ingredients appear to disintegrate on the screen, the Scentee emits aromas of black pepper, sesame and saffron.

“The idea,” says Cheok, “is that you can virtually experience some of the food in the restaurant.”

The professor has also collaborated with the Kraft-owned meat brand Oscar Mayer to produce a bacon-scented alarm clock. Possibly sensing that this innovation may invert the traditional dynamic whereby a product is created to meet a need, Oscar Mayer has produced an ambitious promotional trailer, a copy of which is here in the lab. We look on as a young woman navigates a landscape of dry ice, dodging a hail of bacon rashers. Wearing a diaphanous low-cut gown which seems recklessly unsuited to these inclement surroundings, she caresses her torso with one hand, and brandishes a spatula in the other. “At darkest midnight,” says a male narrator, against a sequence of erotic images that Ken Russell might have rejected as less than subtle, “the nostril’s north star awakes you.” The film ends with the woman waking to a working Scentee and the slogan: “WANT YOUR OWN BACON SCENT ALARM?”

To which most of us would answer, probably not. After all the Teasmade – hugely popular in the Seventies – all but died out, and that at least had tea in it^[4]. That said, it is undeniably reassuring to learn that, should you ever find yourself overcome by the desire to own a bacon alarm, through Scentee you can at least get your hands on one.

If his hardware for the replication of smell is relatively sophisticated, Professor Cheok’s prototype apparatus for simulating taste is somewhat more basic, not to say alarming. Braun hands me a device that consists of a pair of spring-loaded metal prongs which resemble a large clothes-peg. The gadget is attached to a piece of circuit board and battery leads.

“It’s only 40 milliamps,” Braun tells me, as he eases the prongs apart and invites me to place my tongue between them. Sitting at a table, mouth open, wired up to the apparatus and waiting for the young German to press the switch, I’m reminded of a Bob Hope line from the 1940 comedy, Road To Singapore: “My mother told me there would be moments like these. How did she know?”

The electrical current on the tip of your tongue produces a sharp taste, like lemon. It’s unmistakably there, but not necessarily pleasant. Cheok says that the team are experimenting with different combinations of heat and amperage. In that way they can already replicate four of the five known tastes: sour, salty, bitter and sweet. The fifth, known as umami, a savoury note akin to monosodium glutamate, was officially discovered by Kikunae Ikeda, a professor at Tokyo University, in 1908. According to Cheok most people are not able to rate umami, which his team has not yet been able to replicate.

Adrian Cheok began his career in computing at Mitsubishi Research Institute labs in Japan. Subsequently, at the Singapore Mixed Reality Lab, he led a team of a hundred researchers and students and produced highly acclaimed work which placed recordings of three-dimensional human figures into mixed reality landscapes; the results have been compared to the hologram effects employed by Star Wars director George Lucas. One of his early projects, entitled Poultry Internet, enabled farmers to transmit a remote caress to their chickens, using small vibrational devices connected to the birds’ feathers – a technique which, researchers found, significantly increased egg yield.

“The thing about scent,” Cheok tells me, “is that our basic receptors are not working as they usually do. Eyes and ears measure frequency. Smell isn’t like that. Smell is more analogous to a sensor. Taste offers a similar challenge”.

Since Cheok’s Scentee is restricted to producing chemically-generated smells, the professor explains, the team have been working on a new prototype that resembles a mouth guard of the kind that you might use for contact sports. Once activated, the device will produce a series of electromagnetic waves designed to stimulate both sense and smell in the olfactory bulb, a structure located in the forebrain.

“How can you know,” I ask Cheok, “whether the sensations you are generating are accurate? How can you be sure that you are actually replicating the aroma of coffee, say?”

“All science involves collaboration,” he says. “We are working with neuroscientists at the University of Aix-Marseille. What we need to do is to quantify these comparisons using an MRI to see if the smells we induce really do equate to coffee and lemon, say.” Cheok is also interested in measuring how the brain reacts to smells that would be perceived as unpleasant, and to this end his lab is equipped with essence of earthworm.

“We’re trying to measure how the combination of a negative smell and, for instance, a text message, will affect the brain,” he says. “If we can scientifically demonstrate that smell and taste alter your response to a message, then that would mean that you can modulate emotion.”

The professor’s work in transmitting touch via the internet currently takes the form of a plastic ring that you can slip over your finger. The prototype is impressively small, even if it couldn’t yet be mistaken for a fashion accessory. It vibrates whenever the wearer of an identical ring presses their own device. They could be in the next room or, wireless connections permitting, in Guadeloupe. It’s a signalling mechanism which has obvious potential for connecting with children lost in a crowd or, as the research team tells me, with residents in care homes whose other senses may be impaired. The ring represents the first stage of Cheok’s ambition to create a device which, as he puts it, “will allow people to give each other a virtual hug”. He is also refining a device which he calls the Kissinger: essentially a pair of artificial lips attached to a small doll which, by sensing pressure applied by a real mouth to an identical device, allows a couple to exchange kisses over the internet.

Cheok’s broad mission, he tells me, “is to merge the virtual world – the world of data – with the world of the senses. I think that is very important, because the internet is very rapidly moving from behind our desktop into the physical world of taste and touch, as well as smell.” This will mean, for instance, the implanting of sophisticated sensors into robots whose software, realistic appearance and subtlety of response may mean that they are the closest thing some people ever have to a friend, or a lover.

1 The 2,000 Year Old Man's Wikipedia page. The original 2,000 Year Old Man sketch can be found on iTunes.↵

2 The BBC's April Fool's Day prank is memorialised here in the Museum of Hoaxes’ web archive↵

3 These interviewees were (a) Buzz Aldrin and (b) the late Michel Lotito, better known as the omnivore Monsieur Mangetout who also ate several bicycles, a computer, and a complete table setting with cloth, napkins, glasses, plates and wine bottles.↵

4 Although newer versions of the Teasmade and its imitations have an army of devotees.↵