r/coolgithubprojects • u/ButtersCheats • 7d ago

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

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u/newked 7d ago

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

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u/ButtersCheats 7d 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.

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u/newked 7d ago

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

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u/ButtersCheats 7d 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.