"These are pretty subtle odour signals that allow me to create sentences, paragraphs and essays, if you will, of odour messages..."
So says David Edwards, creator of the oPhone, a device that lets you use your iPhone to send smells of your choice to a friend equipped with one of the devices.
Each oPhone contains an oChip, a fingernail-sized chip that can create hundreds of different smells which is activated by an app called oTracks.
The oPhone
Edwards has high hopes for the technology, hoping that one day smells will be as normal a part of long-distance communication than text messages or Tweets are today.
He said: "If Twitter had this enormous impact with very limited information content exchange, you can imagine a complete aroma equivalent of that.
"It’s fascinating how powerful that could be."
Edwards and his team at Le Laboratoire will release the finished product later this year. It will come with two oPhones so people can experience more than one smell at a time.
He said: "You can have these great coffees on one side and breads on the other side. There will be some oTracks that use two oPhones and some that use one."
The most current version was unveiled at the WIRED UK conference and consisted of four devices each one capable of holding eight oChips to create the "sentences, paragraphs and essays" that Edwards speaks of.