A Camera That Captures Scent?
Originally posted June 30, 2013
What do you think of this? I think it’s a great leap forward if it’s usable and affordable. Here’s the link, http://post.jagran.com/now-scentography-camera-that-can-capture-your-favourite-fragrance-1372571707
here’s the article:
Washington: A new camera has been developed that can capture the whiff of your first pet or the smell of the seaside holiday.
Designer Amy Radcliffe’s MA project at Central Saint Martins set out to bring a more meaningful sensory dimension to storing our favourite memories.
What if you could recapture the aroma of that freshly baked birthday cake or the scent of the wild flowers in that Alpine meadow on your last holiday? Or maybe you would choose to recall the musky pong of your first pet, or the comforting whiff of that shampoo your girlfriend used to use?
The Madeleine, named after Marcel Proust’s story of involuntary memory prompted by biting into a cake, is Radcliffe’s design for a new kind of camera that records not images, but smells.
Her project, developed in the college’s Textile Futures department, draws on “headspace capture” techniques pioneered in the 1970s by Swiss fragrance chemist Roman Kaiser, for obtaining the composition of rare botanical scents for the perfume industry.
Radcliffe’s ” scentograph y” camera has a retro-futuristic form, referencing both this 70s heritage and our growing nostalgia in photography – embodied by clunky Lomo cameras and wistful Instagram filters.
With its faceted ceramic casing, glass funnel and plastic tubes, it also looks like a mysterious piece of scientific apparatus.
To make it work, you place the funnel over the object or environment you wish to capture, then a pump sucks the air across an odour trap made of Tenax – a porous polymer resin which adsorbs the volatile particles that make up the smell.
It 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.
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There’s a more in depth article at The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2013/jun/28/scentography-camera-records-smells-memory.
The key words in the story are “…In her speculative scenario…” This is an art-school project. Not something that exists. It’s an imaginary object. In other words, not only does this not exist, but the scenario she imagines would cost tens of thousands of dollars per “photo” because it requires a sample to be sent for GC mass spec analysis and THEN as if that is not expensive enough, a reformulation of the analytical results by chemists and perfumers. (Which may or may not result in the original smell being recreated–as you can well imagine.) Perhaps in the early days of Daguerreotype photography pictures cost about this much (and results were quite poor) so maybe we’ll see something like this in one or two hundred years, but for the moment, this is pure speculation. You will likely not see it “on the market” in your lifetime. Or to put it another way: this is already on the market. It’s called head-space analysis and formulation. Only the giant Flavour and Fragrance corporations can afford to do this at the present time. And they’ve been doing it for at least a couple decades, so this is not in any way new. There have been no breakthroughs here or anything. As they say, “nothing to see here, move along now.”