Forget About Google Glass, Here's Google Nose—It's Smell You Can See!

There's no denying that smell is a powerful sense, get a whiff of freshly baked bread and you're feeling happy, equally if you're unlucky enough to walk past the toilets at a festival you're more likely be retching than smiling. But how about if you could see smells, witness the manifold vapours of the world flowing through the air as trailing, colored visuals? Wouldn't it just be beautiful? It depends on where you were walking.

This concept has been thought up by one Lloyd Alberts in a speculative product called Sniffer—based on Google Glass, it's a head mounted display both for your eyes and nose so you can walk around and smell, say, a delicious steak, and then let these glasses take you to the source of the odour by following the trail, just like a cartoon character.

If it all sounds a bit like some kind of April fools' prank then it comes from the Next Nature Lab, who have come up with such imaginary and experimental products as in vitro Meat Paint for children and a fictional sneaker company that created footwear from "genetically modified stingray leather".

And "Google Nose" is the latest addition to their range of leftfield, and gently mocking, products that explore the satirical extremes of design fiction. Here's what they say about Sniffer: "With the capability to see scents you are capable to identify and locate everything you smell. This could be locating foods or identifying perfumes but you can also use it to find persons. You can easily find your loved ones by following their scent trail."

The product, should it ever get made (maybe Omni Consumer Products might be interested?) comes in a range of not-so-lightweight materials like ivory, platinum, obsidian, lazuli, and mahogany. The joke-product follows on from Google's own April fools' prank from last year, where they pondered the idea of their own Google Nose, a device that lets you experience different smells by searching for them on Google.

[via Inspirationist]

@stewart23rd