The Fragrant Future of Communication

When Rachel D. Field ’12 and her small team encounter a problem, she can’t simply pass off the responsibility to someone else. “I have my degree now,” she says. “In theory, Harvard University says that I’m qualified to do this, so I’m just going to figure it out.” A project that started in a classroom is now unfolding internationally and in the public eye.

Over the past two years, bioengineering professor David A. Edwards, Field, and a team of designers and engineers have created the oPhone, a phone for odors. In a world in which we constantly use technology to communicate our audio and visual experiences with those who aren’t physically with us, virtually sharing another sense seems like the natural next step for these researchers. “If you go back obviously virtual communication was first text, and then we integrated photos, and then there were films, and now there will be scents,” says Edwards.

The oPhone contains chips that are “kind of like ink cartridges for odors,” explains Edwards. Through a scent-based messaging app called oNotes, oPhone users can send and receive smells. Though Edwards has been working with olfactory technology for some time, the oPhone, which will launch in July, is part of a new series of products that he says is “aimed at introducing scent communication into global communications networks.”

The idea of the oPhone originated in Edwards’s Engineering Sciences 20 class: “How to Create Things and Have Them Matter.”

“We see the class with arts and design dreams at some frontier of science,” says Edwards. Each year, the class approaches this concept using a different theme, and throughout the semester, students work in teams on an extensive engineering thought experiment based on this theme. Field took the class in her senior year at Harvard. She recalls that many of the students in the class were not engineers; she was the only engineer in her team of five women. She asserts that students coming from different academic backgrounds are crucial for coming up with “outside-of-the-box ideas,” which is the goal of the class. When Field took the class, the theme was “virtual worlds,” and her team came of with the idea of creating a virtual world of aroma.

Edwards helped to organize a fellowship for the team members who were particularly enthusiastic about the project. In the summer of 2012, Field and her classmate Amy M. Yin ’14 worked to develop the idea into a tangible prototype in Paris at Le Laboratoire, a “contemporary art and design center,” founded by Edwards in 2007.

Yin and Field’s work at Le Laboratoire in 2012 led to an exhibition titled “The Olfactive Project” in the spring and summer of 2013. The exhibit invited the public to listen to, smell, taste, eat, and drink coffee. At the end of the exhibit, visitors could experience the coffee virtually through the oPhone, and then send a virtual olfactive message of the coffee odor around the world.

The press release for The Olfactive Project asked, “If we manage to communicate by way of olfactory sentences, paragraphs, and essays, might we better communicate certain emotions and experiences, and share these across conventional barriers of language, culture, and even species?”

Working towards the exhibition was a challenging experience for Field, who had just graduated from Harvard. She explains that unlike presenting ideas to an audience of peers and professors in college, this exhibit exposed the product to total strangers who had no context for their work. But the team was up for the challenge, and the exhibit was a big success, says Edwards.

While Field still works at the lab in Paris, the company will open a new Le Laboratoire in Kendall Square on July 10, a “hotspot” where oPhone users will be able to download their oNotes and an exhibition space for their products.

In recent years, olfactory technology has been a popular area of research and development, but the products created have not been very effective, says Edwards. Unlike sounds or visuals, aromas linger and cannot simply be turned off like hanging up on a phone call. According to Edwards, the current devices can make very few aromas, usually a maximum of ten.

Edwards explains that at first, his team did not want to look at what had already been developed by other researchers, noting that they “wanted to be as innocent as possible as long as possible.” But as their ideas became more developed, they did have to take a step back and look at what was already out there to ensure that their product was unique in its offerings.

What makes the oPhone different, Edwards says, “is this notion of having a very compact, inexpensive, reloadable way of delivering a lot of aroma information.” The oPhone uses small capsules of code chips filled with aromatic material. Though there are only eight chips, mixing these aromas allows the oPhone to create 72,000 distinct aromas. “From a little bit of complexity, you can create a lot of complexity, and how you do that is sort of where the invention is mostly,” Edwards says. “It’s not just an odor, but it’s a complex sort of symphony.”

Field explains that the oPhone enables users to communicate with individual, personal aromas rather than generic, “scattered” smells. “We created the oPhone as not just a way of sending aromas but as a way to send and receive smart, complex aromas,” she says. Her team has been approached by a variety of groups that have expressed an interest in partnership; the product, she says, could potentially have many different applications. Of all the senses, scent has the strongest correlation with memory.

This project is exciting to Field, as she feels scent technology has not yet been explored to its full potential. “Scent is an underutilized sense, especially relative to visual or audio,” she says. Edwards, Field, and the rest of the oPhone team hope to use technology to further capitalize on its power.