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# Scentronic Sends Smells Over the Internet
- URL: https://blog.harshkohli.com/scentronic-smell-over-internet-ohio-state/
- Published: 2026-10-25T17:04:43.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-25T17:04:43.000Z
- Description: Ohio State researchers built Scentronic, an AI e-nose and wearable scent maker that recreates five smells remotely. How it works and its limits.
- Author: Harsh Kohli
- Tags: Tech News, AI

I didn't expect to be writing about smell on a tech blog this week, but here we are. A group at Ohio State has a prototype that picks up an aroma on one end and recreates a rough copy of it on the other end, over the internet.

## What happened

They call it Scentronic, and the [paper is in Science Advances](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aee9266?ref=blog.harshkohli.com), out 22 October 2026\. The sending side is an "e-nose", basically a box of metal-oxide gas sensors. When stuff like ethanol from beer or limonene from oranges lands on them, their resistance shifts, and a trained model guesses what it's smelling from that pattern.

The smell doesn't travel, obviously. Only the guess does. The receiver has little pots of scented liquid with a vibrating atomiser over each, and it mists out whichever one matches. They made wristband, necklace and handheld versions of that part.

The catch is the menu: beer, cake, coffee, orange, red wine, and nothing else. Chunyu Yang, who led the work, told [New Scientist](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2595189-digital-scents-could-add-a-new-dimension-to-virtual-worlds/?ref=blog.harshkohli.com) that getting enough training data meant exposing the sensors to each smell hundreds of times. In a test with 14 volunteers on the handheld unit, people got the smell right 73 per cent of the time on average.

## Why it matters

Honestly, "smell over the internet" has been announced and quietly dropped so many times I half rolled my eyes at the headline. What got me to read the paper anyway is that this does both halves. It senses and it plays back, instead of being one more scent box that just puffs a preset when a game tells it to.

The team also pitches medical uses, like checking someone for smell loss without them coming into a clinic. I buy that more than smelling a friend's coffee on a video call any time soon. There's even a side prototype that drips flavoured liquid into a glass of water to fake taste, which, sure, why not.

But five smells is tiny, each one has to be loaded in as a liquid ahead of time, and actual rooms smell like ten things at once. Yang told [CNA](https://www.channelnewsasia.com/business/new-scentronic-technology-can-detect-and-transmit-aromas-remotely-6486011?ref=blog.harshkohli.com) it's a research prototype built with no company involved, and that a product would need a lot more training data and recognition that holds up outside the lab.

## What to do

Nothing, for now. You can't buy it, and there's no product or price on the horizon. If a "smell-enabled" headset or app turns up promising this soon, I'd treat it with a lot of suspicion. For a wearable you can actually pre-order, have a look at [Deepinder Goyal's Temple](https://blog.harshkohli.com/temple-brain-wearable-pre-orders-price/) instead.

*Sources:* [*Science Advances (Yang et al.)*](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aee9266?ref=blog.harshkohli.com)*,* [*New Scientist*](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2595189-digital-scents-could-add-a-new-dimension-to-virtual-worlds/?ref=blog.harshkohli.com)*,* [*CNA*](https://www.channelnewsasia.com/business/new-scentronic-technology-can-detect-and-transmit-aromas-remotely-6486011?ref=blog.harshkohli.com)*.*