A Japanese company has created a device that attaches to the bottom of an iPhone and sends smells over the internet. It is called Chat Perf, and you need two of them for the smell to go through, but, yah, this is real. It has an atomizer and smell tank, in which you capture the smell. The device at the other end of the connection recreates the smell and — pfft! — delivers it to you in a little cloud of nasal wonder.

Well, this will effectively get cars off the road, because we’re basically never going to leave the house again. Why bother?

RocketNews24 imagines, for instance, that a rock or pop star might use this to share his aroma with fans:

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If he is famous enough, he could simply fill the tank with the smell of his sweat and send it out.  If the audience isn’t too sweaty themselves they could get a whiff of him even from the back row!

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I mean, at that point, why bother going to the concert at all? You get a front-row view on your phone and the smell of sweat. It’s just like you’re there! All that is missing is the actual sweat dripping on you, but we’re sure they will figure how to recreate that soon, as well.

And just think of all the energy we will save by not leaving our houses! No cars, no trains, no planes, just sights and sounds and smells sent over the internet. You can smell the sea breeze while you’re sitting at your computer. You can smell the best chef in the world cooking up a great steak. By the time they extend this to its logical conclusion and invent holograms, everything should be energy-efficient enough to make it all pretty low-impact.

Or maybe the whole idea is just kind of gross.

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