Every year a list comes out with a bunch of gadgets that you MUST have, because they are new, and they are gadgets, and your life will never be the same again after you’ve bought them.
Plenty of these devices end up in garage sales after a year or two, and the ones that do really take off are often refined and replaced in a few years anyway. That’s OK because everything has to start somewhere. That’s why these prototype inventions get so much attention.
This year the usual drooling is taking place at tech fairs all over the world. Some new ideas are spectacular, like TV screens that roll up like paper, or stackable micro hydroponic farms for the kitchen. However, there is one bit of kit that’s been released this year that surely is going to end up in the ‘I can’t believe I paid money for this’ pile before the rest of them.
Imagine waking up to the smell of freshly brewed coffee and then discovering that there is no coffee being brewed at your place because what you are ACTUALLY experiencing is just a box pumping out coffee smells next to your bed.
For some people this may sound heavenly, for us here at My Grey Nomads, it sounds like torture.
But that’s not all. Manufacturers of the Sensorwake threaten- sorry, promise- to awaken us with delights such as croissants (also not really being baked in your house), and a chocolate scent so strong you will think you are in the Willy Wonka factory. There is no word as to whether the scent of desiccated Umpa-lumpa is included for the purists.
For those people on diets who do not want to feel like they are starving as they wake up to the smell of invisible baked goods, there’s also the waft of freshly cut grass available, which is nice as long as you don’t suffer from hay fever.
According to the website, the fully recyclable cartridges provide 30 awakenings. The whole thing sounds slightly sinister. There you are, noisily snoring away and suddenly a 2 minute blast of ‘seaside’ will result in an ‘awakening’ in which you will discover that rather than laying on a beach in The Maldives you are stuck in a pokey flat in Birmingham with nothing but the rain to keep you company.
Sensorwake says the scents and ‘capsules’ are produced in France, and that they comply with the highest air quality standards available. In countries like China, that would make your bedroom a safer place than the street, but as each ‘smell shot’ only lasts 2 minutes, and there are only 30 shots per capsule, you are only ever going to enjoy an hour of clean, tempting air that tells your brain one thing, and fails miserably to deliver on the promise.
Once your hungry body has shuffled out of bed to the scent of freshly made toast, only to discover that there isn’t any bread in the house, you may want to fire off an angry email to the girlfriend/boyfriend you don’t have and drive off to work in the car you don’t own.
Sensorwake is a crowd funded wonder that inventors have lumbered with the title ‘olfactory alarm clock’ and the Huffington Post says they tested long enough to make its journalists want to get out of bed. Whether it was to smash the device to bits is not clarified.
#GADGETS
