What if you could recapture the aroma of that freshly baked
birthday cake, or the whiff of your lover's shampoo? It may be possible with
this new camera!
Researchers have developed a camera that can capture the scent
of your memories, recording smells instead of images.
The gadget called Madeleine is the invention of designer Amy
Radcliffe at Central Saint Martins, who set out to bring a more meaningful
sensory dimension to storing our favorite memories, the 'Guardian' reported.
"Sense of smell has a direct link to emotional memory.
It is the sense we react to most instinctively, and the furthest away from
being stored or replicated digitally," Radcliffe said.
In order to use the camera a person needs to place the
funnel over the object or environment they wish to capture, and then a pump
sucks the air across an odor trap made of Tenax - a porous polymer resin which
adsorbs the volatile particles that make up the smell.
The working prototype can take anything from a few minutes
to capture the scent of fresh strawberries, to around 24 hours to store the
more subtle aroma of an atmosphere.
"It's like a huge electric nose. It processes the
particles and produces a graph-like formula that makes up the smell. From this
formula you can artificially recreate the precise odor," she said.
Users can take their exposed odor traps to the local lab in
the same way they would take a 35mm film to be processed - the product being
not photos, but delicate vials of the scent, along with a bronze disk of the
specific formula, bringing a precious, ritualistic quality to the process.
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