WATCH: This device lets you send smells through your phone

This may take food pictures on Instagram to a whole new level. 

A company has just sent out its first Transatlantic a scent text message.

Imagine sending a waft of eggs benedict via your smartphone.

That particular whiff may soon be possible thanks to the oPhone, a product of Vapor Communications, a company based in Paris and in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

They did that with the oPhone, which is part of a smell text messaging system cooked up by Harvard professor David Edwards and his co-inventor and former student, Rachel Field.

This week the American Museum of Natural History played host to an oPhone, where Edwards received the first trans-Atlantic scent message – a Champagne-and-chocolate smell-o-gram sent from Paris to New York.

How does it work? 

According to Wired, the oPhone DUO, “a kind of telephone for aromas,” features two cylindrical gadgets that deliver bursts of scents for 10 seconds at a time.

This is made possible by the oChip, a tiny cartridge that can produce hundreds of odors and that Edwards hopes will one day be installed in your smartphone. 

And no need to worry about a bad friend sending you the smell of hot New York trash – the company is concentrating on developing food notes for now.

To send your own smell mail, you need to download the free iPhone app, “oSnap,” which allows users to take a photo and tag it as you would tag friends on Facebook, but with the smell of “malty cereal” or “cedar.”

You can then send this message (or “oNote” as they call it), via email, Facebook or Twitter, to be received at oPhone hotspots – for now, just the Manhattan, Paris and Cambridge, Mass. locations.

Currently, oSnap users have to select the scents for themselves, but Vapor Communications hopes the app will one day be able to detect objects within a picture – say a dense chocolate mud cake – and automatically tag it with the appropriate aroma.

To fund the project, the company has launched an Indiegogo campaign. The oPhone should be available to buy in early 2015 at a presale price of $149, and later at $199.

Source: Washington Post