Some people have whacky tastes in the olfactory department. The smell recorder obliges them too.

First we had the Japanese take us by surprise with movies that exude smells. So if you saw a walnut brownie being served on screen, the theatre would fill up with its freshly baked aroma. Or if the lead actor generously drenched himself in Davidoff Cool Ice before getting into his sartorial best, you would get a whiff of it too.

Well, the Japanese have just bettered themselves. They have finally designed the machine that we thought was the stuff of sci-fi paperbacks — a smell recorder!

Till now, you could record sounds and images. For smells, however, nothing but the real thing would do. Engineers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan, famous for its contribution of hi-tech instrumentation, have put together a smell recorder capable of doing just that — recording smells.

How does this miracle of a gadget work? One simply has to point at an uncorked bottle of Coke or a plate of yummy shudh ghee ka gajar halwa or even some biryani. The small machine analyses the odour and then reproduces it for you whenever you feel like a sniff, using a host of non-toxic chemicals. Many of us have whacky tastes in the odour department – some like the smell of petrol, others raw mangoes, and still others the smell of honest sweat. The machine is for one and all, whatever the preferences.

As for its real life utility, the device can be used to improve online shopping by allowing you to sniff foods or fragrances before you buy them and to add an extra dimension to virtual reality environments like movies that exude smells. It can even be used to assist military doctors treating soldiers remotely by recreating bile, blood or urine odours that might help a diagnosis.

On a more advanced level, the recorder could also do the job of sniffer dogs — smelling inside sealed envelopes, boxes or unclaimed baggage and trying to match the reproduced smell with pre-recorded smells of explosives or narcotics. But that is still a little futuristic.

The Tokyo scientists led by Pambuk Somboon reported their interesting work in a recent issue of New Scientist. Says Somboon, “While a number of companies have produced aroma generators designed to enhance computer games or TV shows, they have failed commercially. This is because they have been very limited in the range of smells.”

So his team decided to do away with pre-prepared smells and developed a system that could record and later reproduce odours. And it was no mean task. In video, one just needs to record shades of red, green and blue. At most, some more colour or angle variations. But humans have 347 olfactory sensors; so a lot of source chemicals were needed to make a veritable repository of smells.

The smell recorder uses 15 chemical-sensing microchips, or electronic noses, to pick up a broad range of aromas. These are then used to create a digital recipe from a set of 96 chemicals that can be chosen according to the purpose of each individual gadget. When you want to replay a smell, drops from the relevant vials are mixed, heated and vapourised. In tests so far, the system has successfully recorded and reproduced the smell of orange, lemon, apple, banana and melon.

“We can even tell a green apple from a red apple,” Somboon says.

Smell researchers are very excited about the new gadget. They are all eagerly awaiting more research and reproduction of a plethora of smells that the system can be trained to detect and recreate.