Originally published at: New device for smelling in stereo | Boing Boing
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That’s snot for me. My nose is itching now.
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There are some things that I don’t want to smell at all, much less in stereo.
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If they can learn to stimulate specific smells on demand, this would be an incredible addition to VR.
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Not my favorite Cars song.
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The basic premise of this is pretty pointless. Light and sound travel much faster and don’t linger like smell, which is why stereo vision and hearing work. In the real world, having more odorant at the left nostril than the right at one moment in time is not evidence that the source of smell is coming from the left. Which is why humans and all animals that track odor sources sample over time and locations to track the source.
If I ever need to track “virtual scents” then this might help. As far as real world smells this wouldn’t improve detection of the smell’s direction
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Oh, you don’t want to mess with your trigeminal nerves.
They can really mess with you.
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Finally we know what these were for!
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“…except for my shoes.” Ew.
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If this feels anything like the nose hair does when I ignore it for a week, then it’s a hard no. Nose hair is in my top 10 useless human traits.
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All fun and games until you get trolled with putrescine!
Exactly right. If stereo smell was even slightly useful there would be animals, probably dogs, who would have evolved laterally separated nostrils.
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moths and bees that are odor tracking experts do use the smell difference between antennae slightly but they can move their antennae independently. Comparing between nostrils would only be usefulf if one couldn’t move their body or head at all
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bilateral symmetry is built into the bauplan.
I have a mild exotropia, and can only simulate depth perception by measures like this. People with eyes in better condition have much better 3D vision.
By “separated” I meant by some nonnegligible distance. Obviously most (all?) mammals have two symmetrically-place nostrils.
For a snake or lizard to use chemosensory tropotaxis, it must be able to sense simul taneously the chemical stimulus at two points. This requirement is met admirably by the forked tongue. The more deeply forked the tongue, the greater the potential distance between simultaneous sampling points. The distance between sampling points (the tip of each tine) is a function of absolute size, fork depth, tongue width, and the degree to which the tines of the fork are spread. A simple tongue fork score can be calculated (Table 1). In some species (snakes, varanid and teiid lizards, and amphisbaenians) the potential distance between the tips is considerable, exceeding the width of the head (Fig. 2) (17).
This mechanism requires that chemical stimuli on each tine be delivered to the ipsilateral VNO, which is the actual sensory organ. Although the mechanism of chemical delivery remains controversial (18), evidence indicates that same-side delivery would be possible either by the tongue itself or by the sublingual plicae.
Why Snakes Have Forked Tongues
Author(s): Kurt Schwenk
Source: Science , Mar. 18, 1994, Vol. 263, No. 5153 (Mar. 18, 1994), pp. 1573-1577
If nothing else, “chemosensory tropotaxis” is likely to be a better search term than “smelling in stereo”…
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Life is strange, I’m smelling in stereo…
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