Osmo is in early stages of actualizing the concept of Scent Teleportation technology that the company has described as "a technology that captures a smell in one part of the world and releases it in another."
Related: Master Perfumer Christophe Laudamiel Joins Osmo
The company's site (https://www.osmo.ai/blog/teleporting-scent) shares: "Our goal at Osmo is to do the same for scent — making it easy to record, analyze, and reproduce scents with environmentally friendly molecules. Scent Teleportation encapsulates this ideal in an elegant process. A sensor picks up the scent of a lavender field. A processor identifies all the molecules at work. The printer finds the right combination of scents to reproduce it. And soon, a New York lab smells like a purple patch of California.
We can already do this for many scents, but all the steps still require manual guidance."
How Scent Teleportation Works
According to Osmo, the lavender must be contained so its scent can be captured. A molecular sensor (GCMS) identifies the molecules at work and using Osmo's proprietary AI and scent map to generate a formula ready for teleportation. Finally, the scent can be recreated using a specialized printer, roughly the size of a refrigerator.
Osmo's next goal will be to teleport a combination of smells. The company also outlined the greater challenge of scaling up performance while reducing human intervention until none is required and shrinking the size and cost of the components until they’re fully portable.
Looking Ahead
Osmo also outlined why the digitization of scent is important for the future:
- An AI-guided sensor capable of identifying the molecular makeup of any scent would be a bottomless source of data.
- It would unlock a new dataset for training AI systems.
- This would be especially valuable in an age of copyright-based data scarcity.
- On the other end of Teleportation, the printer builds on our efforts to find the simplest ways to reproduce any existing scent.
- Digitizing scent would mean re-sensitizing the digital world, while bringing a much wider array of authentic scents into the physical realm.
