题型:阅读理解 题类:常考题 难易度:普通
江苏省南通市通州区2018-2019学年高二上学期期末联考英语试卷(音频暂未更新)
When David Edwards founded the oPhone, he hoped scent (嗅觉的) messages would become the next big thing in the digitization of our online lives.
The device looked like a high-tech cruet set (调味瓶), and allowed a friend with an iPhone app to send you scent messages alongside photos. Send a picture of your dinner, tag it with four different tones, and whoever is on the receiving end can sniff it from the vase-like tubes of the oPhone.
The oPhone didn't take off, and the company has now shifted focus to a “scent speaker” called the Cyrano, which similarly uses a range of scent capsules to emit “play lists” of smells.
Compared to our real world interactions, our online lives are lacking in scent. Our digital culture, so soaked in visual and aural stimuli, is odorless (没有气味的). So why didn't his marriage of smell and picture messaging excite more interest?
From a technical point of view, smell is simply harder to mass communicate than sounds and pictures. “There are two main technological obstacles to making smell transmissible by digital means,” explains biophysicist and author of Perfumes: The A -Z guide, Dr Luca Turin.
“First, there are no odor 'primaries' like RGB or CMYK. Second, it has proved impossible to stimulate the olfactory epithelium (上皮组织) directly by any means tried so far. This means that it is currently impossible to induce a sensation of smell without there being an actual chemical in the inhaled air (吸入的空气).”
“The more we're plugged into the virtual world, the more we deeply appreciate the contrast-moments in our human, experience,” says designer and olfactory artist Mindy Yang.
“Intuitively, we realize that we are starved of certain sensations. With the rise of digital culture, society has become more interested in the missing sense-c-what we smell.”
This interest in scent isn't only happening within the worlds of perfume and fashion. Over the past few years a number of cultural projects have set out to focus on the power of sensory experiences, from the use of a smell map, to the Tate Sensorium, which in 2015 let users experience visual art alongside smells, tastes and sounds.
Whether it's devices like the oPhone that try to introduce scent into digital messaging, organizations are growingly aware of our culture's desire for sensory experiences. In a time of virtual reality and scentless social networks, it's perhaps no wonder that we as a culture have such a desire for something that instinctively feels real and authentic-even if it was made in a lab.
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