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Engineers Take Step Closer to Smell-a-Vision
"闻香"看电视

How many times has it happened to you: you’re sitting around watching a rerun of Friends and you think: Man, if only I could catch a whiff of that hazelnut mochaccino they’re all pretending to drink. Well, me neither.
你有没有经历过这种事情:你无所事事的坐着看《老友记》的回放,想着要是我也可以闻一闻他们正要喝的榛子摩卡就好了。好吧,其实我也经历过。

But engineers have now developed a programmable, odor-emitting device that, like it or not, brings us one step closer to realizing the dream of smell-a-vision. Their design is described in the journal Angewandte Chemie. [Hyunsu Kim et al, An X–Y Addressable Matrix Odor-Releasing System Using an On–Off Switchable Device]
其实,工程师们已经发明了一种可编程香味释放装置,不管你喜不喜欢,它让我们离嗅觉影像的实现更进一步。他们的设计发表在《应用化学》期刊上。

TV tickles us with sight and sound. Why not smells? All you’d need is a box that would sit near the set and generate fragrances that match the images on screen: a woman’s perfume or a hot apple pie. But how big would the device have to be to generate thousands of odors?
电视通过影像和声音吸引我们。为何不尝试一下嗅觉吸引?我们所需要的就是一个放在电视机的附近的盒子,它能够根据屏幕上的画面产生相应的味道,比如说一个女人的香水或者一个热乎乎的苹果派。那这个产生上千种味道的装置该有多大呢?

To keep the dimensions down, the scientists envision using a 100-by-100 grid, so that just 200 on/off switches could unleash 10,000 stored bouquets. Which they say makes the whole thing “quite doable.”
为减小它的体积,科学家设想利用100×100的网格元件,这样仅需200个开关控件就可以释放1万种预存的味道。这样就增加了这件事的可行性。

The question then becomes: why would anyone want to do it? Presumably there are some things that are best left unsmelled. Because a sound cue is perfectly sufficient to tell us where Archie Bunker or Al Bundy has just been.
问题接踵而至:所有人都希望这样吗?不想的原因大概就是不想最好的东西被其他人闻到吧。毕竟一个声音提示就足以告诉我们亚奇·邦克或者奥·邦迪刚才在哪。

—Karen Hopkin

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