Smell-enhanced SMS? Here's the app for that

Plain-jane text messages are sooo 1990s. Smell-enhanced mobile messages are the wave of the future.

 

Enter the oPhone, a device paired with an iPhone app that can send and receive "electronic aroma messages," as its developers claim.

"Think of it as a kind of telephone for aromas. With the oPhone, you can now bring complex scent texting into your mobile messaging life, and share sensory experience with anyone, anywhere," developer Vapor Communications said on crowdsourced funding site Indiegogo.com.

 

In coming up with the oPhone, the company said aromas "do something to our minds and bodies that sounds and sights simply cannot."

 

Such aromas can "elicit memories, diminish stress, and excite our emotions," it said.

Each oPhone has an "aromatic vocabulary" that can create over 300,000 unique aroma combinations, the developer said.

 

"Not only is it powerful, it is also beautifully designed and will look great wherever you decide to put it," it added.

 

The product, dubbed oPhone DUO, can diffuse over 300,000 unique aromas with small, "inexpensive" circular cartridges called oChips.

 

Aromas last for hundreds of uses, and can be swapped in and out and capture any scent.

 

However, the developer said the smells that can be sent or received may be limited, noting the oPhone "can only diffuse the aromas that you create on oSnap (app)."

 

"When you take a picture on oSnap, you choose the aromas that you want to add to the picture – the app does not choose them for you. One technological advancement we’re excited to implement when the time is right are computer vision algorithms that can detect objects within a picture and automatically tag them with their corresponding aromas. We’re not quite there yet, but help us meet our stretch goal and we’ll get there!" it said.

 

A separate report on Mashable said the oPhone may be available only at the Museum of Natural History and at Le Laboratoire in Paris.

 

"Users who send an oSnap from their iPhone can travel to the two locations and download the message — called an oNote — along with the scent," it said. — Joel Locsin/TJD, GMA News