Now available on the Web? Smells
Who hasn’t been transported back to childhood by the sweet aroma of baking cookies, or to a favorite forest by the earthy smell of leaf litter, or to a summer beach by the tang of salt air? Harvard Professor David Edwards and a former student, Rachel Field, want to harness the evocative power of smell, not just to bring us back, but to bring us closer. Field and Edwards, the Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Idea Translation at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically-Inspired Engineering, today demonstrated a smell-based device called an oPhone, which aims to add another sense to digital communications. The pair bridged the Atlantic Ocean during a New York news conference this morning when Edwards sent a sniff of a New York breakfast — fresh bread, orange juice, and strawberries — to Paris, where colleagues returned...