Question: Is it possible in the future to make a phone where apart from hearing and seeing things, you can smell the things there as well?

Rowena Fletcher-Wood answered on 14 Mar 2014:

Yes. There is some interesting research going on at the moment into the way smell works (wellll… the way maggots smell) and whether it is shape selective and how these receptors are triggered. The restruction with technology at the moment is that the only way we know to trigger smell receptors is to put out molecules that smell! Once we know other ways to trigger these receptors we should be able to build smell pictures. 🙂 I just wonder whether it will be like sight – something you can turn off by shutting your eyes, or something you can’t control like hearing.