It seems that every year people have their eyes glued to their phones more and more. Technology has been increasing at a rapid rate, but a team of engineers is trying to reverse this.
Harvard professor David Edwards and his students Rachel Field and Amy Yin have teamed up with the Le Laboratoire, the Wyss Institute at Harvard, and Studio Millimetre’s Baptiste Viala and Laurent Milon to create the oPhone.
Imagine a less stressful, more sensual, incredibly inclusive world of global communications where a moving gesture of friendship, a culinary pleasure, and a childhood memory are all just a touch away,” the oPhone’s website says. “This is the world we hope to create with the oPhone.”
No longer will users need their eyes or ears to communicate with friends and family. Instead, smell will allow people to feel what the other is experiencing. According to CNN, Edwards says their motto is “aroma tells a thousand pictures.”
Edwards has also created sensory friendly objects in the past, including zero calorie chocolate spray. After teaming up with Givaudan and Café Coutume, a wide variety of any scent one could imagine has been contained in “Ochips.” The scents will be released by heat from one’s finger when it touches the button.
The oPhone also will allow users up to 365 different combos of scents in the first model. In the next year, it will rise to thousands.
According the oPhone’s website, they will be testing the technology at London’s annual Wire Magazine Conference in October. In London, people will be sending scents of coffee to the engineers in Paris, while sitting at a coffee bar at the conference. The engineers in Paris will then return their messages with scents of fruit tarts.
On July 10th of next year, the launch of the oPhone will come with a social network. The app will be free, and let users send smells by text message or email. What’s even wilder, is that any normal phone will be able to receive these. The message can be downloaded in the launch city’s, Boston, hot spots.
It’s pretty difficult to imagine a world of communication with smell instead of pictures and words. However, it sounds pretty simple to use. It would also be amazing to lock in the scent from your favorite home-cooked meal or tropical beach. Will this reverse the obsession with technology and phones, or will it make it even worse?