Those who have long labored under television that does not sporadically emit gaseous belches of chemicals may soon be relieved of their tedium, thanks to scientists who did not cure cancer yet but have instead been working hard to perfect ye olde Smell-O-Vision technology. Samsung has partnered with researchers at the University of California San Diego to create a tiny device for your TV—and perhaps most ominously, your cell phone—that will use a matrix of tiny wires to heat up and then disseminate a possible array of 10,000 separate smells, everything from “bacon” to “flowers” to “thing that smells like bacon flowers.”
Naturally, the technology is expected to be most attractive to advertisers who want to lure in potential buyers with spritzes of perfume or wafting food smells, but there’s some expectation that “TV producers will probably want scents that are tailored to match the personalities of their characters,” such as “scotch and aftershave” for Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock, or “sweaty desperation” for Ashton Kutcher on Two And A Half Men. And so the applications could be endless, insofar as the number of unpredictably generated, artificial odors that you’d like to have stinking up your living room in an increasingly thick cloud is hypothetically endless, which is to say that no, no one really wants that. [via Gizmodo]