Seonglae ChoHard to separate
Digitizing smell is hard because it’s difficult to decompose an odor into a small set of independent, controllable “basis” components (unlike light, which can be approximated with a few primary colors).
A single rose scent involves more than 300 volatile compounds interacting dynamically, which is why fully digitizing smell remains a challenging problem.
Tech companies such as Google and Osmo are changing the fragrance industry by learning the relationship between molecular structure and odor (Structure-Odor Relationship), then predicting scents and visualizing them as a digital map called the Principal Odor Map (POM).
They analyzed over 5,000 fragrance molecules to produce a 63-dimensional “odor embedding,” achieving 85% agreement with expert human judgments. Building on this, Osmo reportedly discovered a non-toxic mosquito repellent to replace DEET and reproduced the same scent as one ounce of rose oil using synthetic molecules instead of the roughly 60,000 flowers normally required.
