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(January 21, 2014) We have all sorts of ways to communicate with one another:
text messages, emails, Gchats and, according to my sources, even phone calls.
We live in a word-heavy world, and why not? A sentence, both spoken and
written, is a highly efficient way to transmit a lot of information with very
little time and effort. But words aren’t necessarily the best way to express
every idea. Logistically speaking, verbal and written languages have cultural barriers
that are sometimes insurmountable. Emotionally speaking, sometimes words just
don’t do justice for what we’re trying to convey.
Edwards is the always-buzzing
mind behind Le Laboratoire, the Paris innovation tank and research facility
that brought us Wikipearls and Le Whaf. The group’s most recent invention, the
oPhone, is aiming to make olfactory communication commonplace by transmitting
odors much in the same way you send text messages.
Full-sensory correspondence is still a long way off. We’re
just now beginning to explore how powerful virtual touch could be in connecting
with each other. But there’s one sense that’s been notoriously missing from the
landscape: smell. “When you think about how important the olfactive is in
almost every type of communication, its absence in global communication is sort
of astounding,” says David Edwards.