Trust the Japanese to invent something like this. It’s been a long time coming, ever since the world was introduced to the idea of synthetic smells with the brief, but interesting spell of scratch-n-sniff stickers. Now, instead of making smells that come out of stickers, they’re making smells come out of your phone. That’s right, they’ve made a smartphone accessory that can make your room smell like coffee. Or Bacon. Or Curry. Whatever revs your motor.

In fact, there seems as if there’s no end to the number of smells this thing can create. The idea is to pair smells with notifications, apparently. Koki Tsubouchi of Scentee Inc explains:

This is the world’s first product that alerts users by scent when they get likes on Facebook. In the future, we plan to make this work with not only Facebook, but also Twitter, Line (a WhatsApp equivalent), phone calls and emails.

Come on, this is really weird, whichever way you look at it. Who wants to smell their grandma’s phonecalls, or sniff their boss’ email? Really now.

Apparently it’s already on sale in Japan, and costs around R350. It’s set to launch in the UK on November 15. The device plugs into the headphone jack of Apple and Android systems – but you’ll need to buy smell capsules as well. Each scent capsule costs around R50 and lasts for around 100 uses.

Below is a Japanese video promoting the product. Instead of making a 30-second ad that captures people’s attention, they decided to do this. It wont make much sense – even with subtitles. But watch it anyway.

[Source : Metro, YouTube]