Piss Off Hungry Friends and Family with This Scent-Embedding Food Photo Printer

One of the loudest complaints I hear about Instagram is its ability to remind you of just how bad your own lunch sucks. Oh, you’re all out eating at the new super-cool gourmet gastropub trying out their chipotle drenched curly fries, are you? Gee, thanks for the invite, f*ckers! Now, imagine for a second if those pictures not only looked unbearably, infuriatingly delicious, but smelled like it too?

Flip. The F*cking. Table.

Born from a desire to allow people to “capture the fragrances of food when dining overseas and send it to friends back home,” this “Food Printer” prototype is a combination camera, printer and “smell extractor.” It works by simultaneously photographing, analyzing and simulating your foods’ smell via the different aroma inks stored in the machine.

No word on how good or true-to-life these replications would be, but the student-done design was good enough to have won Sony’s “most-fun” award at its sixth annual Student Design Workshop. One early image shows a man blissfully experiencing photographed plates of salad through both his eyes and his nose.

And just think of how brilliantly capitalistic it would be to have restaurants or chefs make scented business cards with this bad boy. I’m sorry, were you saying something? For some reason, I’m now strangely overcome with the desire for deep fried chicken katsu and gravy fries. And yes, I’d love you to cater my wedding.

Unfortunately, Sony currently has no plans to mass produce the “Food Printer,” but according to Cai Lelei, senior manager with Sony China’s PR department, they are “considering taking some of the designs to the market.”

So what do you guys think? Could scented food prints be food porn’s saving grace?

[Via Design Taxi, China Daily]