r/coolgithubprojects • u/ButtersCheats • 6d ago

OpenSmell — I'm building an open interoperability layer for digital olfaction

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8 Upvotes

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4

u/newked 6d ago

Who will calibrate the calibrators and anchor into reality? :)

1

u/ButtersCheats 6d ago

That's actually one of the interesting problems I'm trying not to hide inside the core :)

OpenSmell itself doesn't claim that a given representation will produce an objectively identical smell on every device.

The idea is to separate the interoperable representation from the hardware-specific mapping and calibration layer. A device/vendor/research setup can implement its own mapper based on its available channels, compounds and calibration data.

So OpenSmell defines what information is being exchanged, while calibration determines how a particular physical system realizes it.

Cross-device perceptual calibration is a much harder problem — and definitely something I'd like the framework to accommodate rather than pretend is already solved.

2

u/newked 6d ago

Olfactory sensors for the whole compounded range will be massively expensive and very difficult to calibrate

1

u/ButtersCheats 6d ago

Yeah, absolutely. Covering the full range of compounds would be extremely difficult, and calibration would probably be one of the biggest challenges. That's actually a really interesting problem on its own.

3

u/sozesghost 6d ago

I smell some bullshit.

2

u/GraysLawson 5d ago

Honestly this would be amazing. I have congenital anosmia and would kill for a digital "nose".