TV set that emits smells? This startup has what it takes to make it happen

Smell is the sense most strongly connected to memory, but it was the words of a university professor that transported South Korean entrepreneur Dong Wook Kim back to his childhood living room. During a lecture at Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), Kim’s professor talked about how despite decades of technological advances, no one had figured out a viable way to integrate smell with TV broadcast.

Kim, who was still searching for a theme to base his research around, immediately remembered a conversation with his mother from 1980 – the same year that South Korea began receiving color television broadcasts.

“My family bought a color TV around the same time they became available – keep in mind, this was two decades after color broadcast started in Japan,” Kim says. “This cutting-edge technology had a big impact on me. I distinctly remember my mother telling me, ‘Now we can see everything in color, but someday we’ll get the smell also.’ The idea had never left my brain, and I suddenly realized my area of research.”

Kim’s startup, Aromajoin, just might be the future of movie theaters, interactive advertisements – and maybe even home entertainment.

Many attempts at integrating smell with video exist, especially at theme parks with so-called 4D movie theaters. But there’s a problem with many existing “smell-o-vision 2.0” apparatuses – they’re expensive and they often use liquid-based aroma sprays. The problem with liquid, Kim explains, is that scent particles diffuse too quickly. Sprays also have to be refilled often, decreasing cost-effectiveness.

Aromajoin’s “Aroma Shooters” use solid scent cartridges. Kim explains the advantage of a solid over a liquid:

Imagine if I pour some water onto the table. By itself, it evaporates quickly, but if I use a sponge to capture the water, it remains there much longer. By designing a solid aroma cartridge – essentially, putting that sponge into a contained environment – we can shut out the temperature and airflow to even further slow down evaporation. Then, by using a fan, we can push the scent out in small increments. Smell only comes when the fan is on, and it stops as soon as the fan stops.
​

The inner working of an Aroma Shooter. The black triangles, about the size of a 100 yen coin, are solid aroma cartridges.


Aromajoin’s current cartridge prototypes can provide three seconds of aroma more than 45,000 times each. That means a single cartridge can be used 250 times a day for up to six months (Kim says that different scents have different sized molecules, so some scents will last longer than others).

In addition to lasting longer, Aroma Shooters can instantly mix up to six different scents. Again, by using a solid cartridge, scents can be changed in just 0.1 seconds – faster than the human nose can scientifically detect a change. The current effective range of the current Aroma Shooter is 60 to 80 cm – and smells don’t linger after they’re triggered, either.

Kim says the startup can provide approximately 500 scents to potential customers – around 300 perfumes in addition to 200 essential oils.

Aromajoin’s Aroma Player software is simple and straightforward – it almost resembles music mixing software a la Garageband. Just upload a video and drag-and-drop scents (or mixtures of scents) at specific times. The example that was shown to me was a perfume advertisement, with the narrator traveling through the jungle to find specific fruits and herbs to make the perfect scent. As each was encountered, the Aroma Shooters went to work. The smells were never overpowering, like walking through a high-end department store’s fragrance area can often be, and I was impressed with home seamlessly the scents transitioned from one to another without mixing (unless the mix was intentional. The final scent was of the perfume itself – an intriguing way to show off a designer aroma.

Additionally, a demonstration terminal using an iPad (pictured at the top of this post) allows users to simply touch an image and have its corresponding scent released instantly.