The final moments of famous celebrities are being reconstructed by researchers using smells and sounds.
Breda University researchers in the Netherlands have recreated the final moments of several people, including John F. Kennedy and Whitney Houston. They have designed four metal boxes to recreate the final moments of chosen subjects. Visitors can lay inside the boxes, in order to smell the perfume of Jackie Kennedy and human blood.
Smells of a Hollywood bathtub are also recreated for those who wish to experience some of the stimuli experienced by Whitney Houston, just prior to her demise in 2012. In addition to JFK and Houston, sounds and smells of the final moments of former Libyan Prime Minister of Libya Muammar Gaddafi, and England's Princess Diana. The entire program lasts about five minutes.
Users climb inside the pitch-dark coffin-like chambers, and a soundtrack plays, as smells are pumped into the mechanism.
"Smell is rarely used in communication and we wanted to explore its uses. It's a very powerful means of communication," Frederik Duerinck of the communication and multimedia design department at Breda's Avans University of Applied Sciences, said.
Emotion and memory can be triggered by smells, providing a lifelike experience for those visiting the macabre chambers.
Gaddafi, the former Libyan leader, hid in a drainage pipe attempting to escape revolutionaries before he was captured and killed in October 2011.
"You can watch the pictures as many times as you want, it's just not the same thing... I almost felt myself being hunted," Riks Soepenberg, a 31-year-old man who experienced Gaddafi's last moments, told reporters.
Houston died at age 48 in a bathtub in Hollywood, from an overdose of cocaine that led to drowning. The experience of the chamber designed to recreate her death begins with sounds of the singer's voice and splashing water. Then, the user smells a bathroom cleaner often used in hotels, as well as olive oil, which Houston was known to use in baths. An acrid, chemical smell recreating the smell of cocaine fills the chamber, which can be felt in the throat of the occupant. The sound of rushing water is the last thing heard by the user, before the soundtrack falls silent.
Researchers used what information was available to them in order to faithfully recreate the sounds and smells of these final moments, although they are not sure everything is exactly accurate. Data included in research used to design the chambers included Houston's autopsy report and recorded information on the scents worn by President and First Lady during that fateful day in Dallas. The perfume worn by Jackie Kennedy on November 22, 1963 is no longer manufactured, leading researchers to improvise.
