What if you could catch a wiff of lemons while listening to Beyoncé’s Lemonade? Vapor Communications launched what it’s calling a digital scent speaker that lets you cycle through different smells to help boost your mood, cover up a stench, or bring videos into the fourth dimension.
The Cyrano, approximately the size of a four-ounce jar, has swappable scent capsules, or oChips, that can be combined into “mood medleys,” like “Get Relaxed” (honeysuckle, lavender, lilac, and vanilla), “Get Away” (guava, coconut, suntan, and venetian bellini) or “Get Energized” (pine, peppermint, orange ginger, and wingz). The device holds three capsules at a time, each containing four scents, like lilac, guava, peppermint, vanilla, and more. The idea is that it cycles from orange to lilac, so you don’t get used to one fragrance and stop getting the neurological signal to smell it. You use its app, oNotes, to “play” the scents and can watch specially made videos to go along with your olfactory journey. Users can also create their own personalized medleys to evoke a sense memory of their favorite vacation.
“Cyrano introduces to the commercial market a revolutionary new way to link one of the most important human senses to our digital world,” said David Edwards, Harvard professor and Cyrano inventor, in a press release. “Our moods are influenced by light as with sunshine and by sound as with music, but even more profoundly by scent, as with the fragrance of an orchid, or the aroma of hot chocolate. The olfactory nerve is the only sensory nerve with direct access to the brain. With Cyrano, we can design our lives with all three dimensions of sensorial control.”
For $150, you can preorder a Cyrano device; each oChip refill will cost $12.
