Now You can Smell Places !

Those innovative guys at Japan got together and decided that the internet did not give enough of an olfactory sensation to surfers. They decided to take Google maps, and add places to it tagged with unique smells. They are the Nio-Bu, the connoisseurs of smell, and they hang out at www.nioibu.com.

The entire web site is in Japanese, so you will have to use Google’s translation tool to make any sense of it. Even in English though, sense will be a difficult thing to find. What you will find though, is where in the world you can smell filthy roadside garbage, cats with bad breath, spilt wine on carpet, roasted cow-dung or dry spit and chai. For some reason, the site assumes that all grandmother’s houses smell the same, but no one has really taken the trouble to refute their claims. Not all the smells are bad though, you can check out a freshly unboxed Mac, and strangely enough, even what our sun smells like, right here on Earth.

You can add your own odors to the list, and if that does not occupy your time, you can look at a list of photos of people “smelling the smell”. As of now, there is no mechanism by which the website can actually let surfers get a whiff of their long list of strange odors, but the Japanese act fast when an idea strikes them.