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Will your phone one day let you smell as well as see and hear what’s on the other end of a call?
(theconversation.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This will never happen. Smell-o-Vision and its successors have been in development for decades, and they all have the same issue: where to store the numerous scent liquids. You can't just digitize scent and generate it on demand with some kind of solid state device. You can't just combine three liquids to make 1000 scents—the article's analogy of combining light to make colors is overly optimistic, bordering on delusional.
The other two related problems are convenience and cost. This is 1000% a novelty, and novelties quickly lose their appeal after you experience it the first time. Who is seriously going to be going out to buy replacement cartridges for a thing that is essentially a toy?
At most I could see it being a kind of novelty for stuff like movie theaters to add to the immersion. And the obvious ads bullshit.
Through let's be frank: movie theaters want you to smell popcorn, so you buy snacks. Smell-o-Vision would have to be more lucrative than a $15 bucket of popcorn.