Led by the Nose. Robert Chalmers

and spices in a mortar. Armed with a smartphone loaded with the Scentee app, a prospective visitor can simulate the grinding action by rotating a finger on the phone’s display, where an image of the bowl appears. As the ingredients appear to disintegrate on the screen, the Scentee emits aromas of black pepper, sesame and saffron.

      “The idea,” says Cheok, “is that you can virtually experience some of the food in the restaurant.”

      The professor has also collaborated with the Kraft-owned meat brand Oscar Mayer to produce a bacon-scented alarm clock. Possibly sensing that this innovation may invert the traditional dynamic whereby a product is created to meet a need, Oscar Mayer has produced an ambitious promotional trailer, a copy of which is here in the lab. We look on as a young woman navigates a landscape of dry ice, dodging a hail of bacon rashers. Wearing a diaphanous low-cut gown which seems recklessly unsuited to these inclement surroundings, she caresses her torso with one hand, and brandishes a spatula in the other. “At darkest midnight,” says a male narrator, against a sequence of erotic images that Ken Russell might have rejected as less than subtle, “the nostril’s north star awakes you.” The film ends with the woman waking to a working Scentee and the slogan: “WANT YOUR OWN BACON SCENT ALARM?”

To which most of us would answer, probably not. After all the Teasmade – hugely popular in the Seventies – all but died out, and that at least had tea in it^[4]. That said, it is undeniably reassuring to learn that, should you ever find yourself overcome by the desire to own a bacon alarm, through Scentee you can at least get your hands on one.

      If his hardware for the replication of smell is relatively sophisticated, Professor Cheok’s prototype apparatus for simulating taste is somewhat more basic, not to say alarming. Braun hands me a device that consists of a pair of spring-loaded metal prongs which resemble a large clothes-peg. The gadget is attached to a piece of circuit board and battery leads.

      “It’s only 40 milliamps,” Braun tells me, as he eases the prongs apart and invites me to place my tongue between them. Sitting at a table, mouth open, wired up to the apparatus and waiting for the young German to press the switch, I’m reminded of a Bob Hope line from the 1940 comedy, Road To Singapore: “My mother told me there would be moments like these. How did she know?”

      The electrical current on the tip of your tongue produces a sharp taste, like lemon. It’s unmistakably there, but not necessarily pleasant. Cheok says that the team are experimenting with different combinations of heat and amperage. In that way they can already replicate four of the five known tastes: sour, salty, bitter and sweet. The fifth, known as umami, a savoury note akin to monosodium glutamate, was officially discovered by Kikunae Ikeda, a professor at Tokyo University, in 1908. According to Cheok most people are not able to rate umami, which his team has not yet been able to replicate.

      Adrian Cheok began his career in computing at Mitsubishi Research Institute labs in Japan. Subsequently, at the Singapore Mixed Reality Lab, he led a team of a hundred researchers and students and produced highly acclaimed work which placed recordings of three-dimensional human figures into mixed reality landscapes; the results have been compared to the hologram effects employed by Star Wars director George Lucas. One of his early projects, entitled Poultry Internet, enabled farmers to transmit a remote caress to their chickens, using small vibrational devices connected to the birds’ feathers – a technique which, researchers found, significantly increased egg yield.

      “The thing about scent,” Cheok tells me, “is that our basic receptors are not working as they usually do. Eyes and ears measure frequency. Smell isn’t like that. Smell is more analogous to a sensor. Taste offers a similar challenge”.

      Since Cheok’s Scentee is restricted to producing chemically-generated smells, the professor explains, the team have been working on a new prototype that resembles a mouth guard of the kind that you might use for contact sports. Once activated, the device will produce a series of electromagnetic waves designed to stimulate both sense and smell in the olfactory bulb, a structure located in the forebrain.

      “How can you know,” I ask Cheok, “whether the sensations you are generating are accurate? How can you be sure that you are actually replicating the aroma of coffee, say?”

      “All science involves collaboration,” he says. “We are working with neuroscientists at the University of Aix-Marseille. What we need to do is to quantify these comparisons using an MRI to see if the smells we induce really do equate to coffee and lemon, say.” Cheok is also interested in measuring how the brain reacts to smells that would be perceived as unpleasant, and to this end his lab is equipped with essence of earthworm.

      “We’re trying to measure how the combination of a negative smell and, for instance, a text message, will affect the brain,” he says. “If we can scientifically demonstrate that smell and taste alter your response to a message, then that would mean that you can modulate emotion.”

      The professor’s work in transmitting touch via the internet currently takes the form of a plastic ring that you can slip over your finger. The prototype is impressively small, even if it couldn’t yet be mistaken for a fashion accessory. It vibrates whenever the wearer of an identical ring presses their own device. They could be in the next room or, wireless connections permitting, in Guadeloupe. It’s a signalling mechanism which has obvious potential for connecting with children lost in a crowd or, as the research team tells me, with residents in care homes whose other senses may be impaired. The ring represents the first stage of Cheok’s ambition to create a device which, as he puts it, “will allow people to give each other a virtual hug”. He is also refining a device which he calls the Kissinger: essentially a pair of artificial lips attached to a small doll which, by sensing pressure applied by a real mouth to an identical device, allows a couple to exchange kisses over the internet.

      Cheok’s broad mission, he tells me, “is to merge the virtual world – the world of data – with the world of the senses. I think that is very important, because the internet is very rapidly moving from behind our desktop into the physical world of taste and touch, as well as smell.” This will mean, for instance, the implanting of sophisticated sensors into robots whose software, realistic appearance and subtlety of response may mean that they are the closest thing some people ever have to a friend, or a lover.

      1 The 2,000 Year Old Man's Wikipedia page. The original 2,000 Year Old Man sketch can be found on iTunes.↵

      2 The BBC's April Fool's Day prank is memorialised here in the Museum of Hoaxes’ web archive↵

      3 These interviewees were (a) Buzz Aldrin and (b) the late Michel Lotito, better known as the omnivore Monsieur Mangetout who also ate several bicycles, a computer, and a complete table setting with cloth, napkins, glasses, plates and wine bottles.↵

      4 Although newer versions of the Teasmade and its imitations have an army of devotees.↵

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      The first sniff

      “The sniff has no equivalent in sight or hearing. It’s an essential ability and yet it can’t be performed covertly. The brain isn’t just a passive recipient of smells. It manages the acquisition of odour by speed.”

      The notion of being able to capture, blend and disseminate smell is not a new one. As early as 1884 the French writer J-K Huysmans published his novel À Rebours (Against Nature)^[1] in which the main character, a reclusive aesthete, operated what is described as a “mouth organ” consisting of a keyboard connected to tubes leading to casks of liqueurs, enabling a player to compose a kind of fragrant alcoholic symphony. A similar device is found