Towards an Odor Communication and Synthesis System
David Harel
Dept. of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics,
The Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
We propose a setup for an odor communication and synthesis system. The
applications of such a scheme are essentially limitless: from e-commerce,
games and video via the food and cosmetics industry to medical diagnosis.
The various parts of the approach will be described, and ways to realize
them will be outlined. Our approach enables an output device --- the whiffer
(a sort of smell printer) --- to release an imitation of an odor read in by
an input device --- the sniffer (e.g., an electronic nose) --- upon command.
The heart of the system is the novel mathematical/algorithmic scheme that
makes the scheme feasible.
We have been carrying out a large amount of work researching and
developing some of the components that constitute the scheme, many of which
have to do with the understanding and analysis of electronic nose space,
including odor identification and classification and mixing. The talk will
report on these results too.
