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You are looking at a map on your computer screen, planning your summer vacation. Imagine being able to actually smell the seaside, the alpine lake or the rain forest you want to visit, or to get a whiff of parts of Manhattan, Mumbai, or other big cities before you decide whether to go and see the sights.

Carleton University cybercartographer Fraser Taylor and his colleagues have already developed multimedia maps and atlases that use sound, music, photos and artwork to convey information about places such as Antarctica and the Arctic. Now he and doctoral student Tracey Lauriault are working on maps with scents.

They are putting together a prototype of a scented digital map. It will use a virtual odour display, or scent diffuser, a device that is available commercially for as little as $369 U.S. One particular model releases up to 60 scents from a cartridge containing liquid scent capsules. Think of it like a desktop ink-jet printer, Ms. Lauriault said. Essential oils are heated and diffused into the air with a small fan. The computer tells it which scents to release, with options that include the smell of coffee, an apple orchard or burnt wires. The software allows people to make personalized scents, which they can transfer by "smell-mail" to someone else with a diffuser. The scents can also be used in interactive web-based applications.

Ms. Lauriault is developing a scented digital map for the Bytowne Museum in Ottawa. She is considering, for example, using the smell of sawdust to help convey the importance of lumberyards that once dominated a large working-class neighbourhood.

"We aren't using scent on its own, but in connection with sounds, music, the clacking of horse hoofs, the sounds of sawmills," said Ms. Lauriault. "Scent is an immersive and subtle media, tied to memory, recall, and how people feel and sense a place." Our sense of smell, she said, is often overlooked and undervalued.

"With our work, we are trying to reclaim it to advance geographic knowledge but also to reposition it in our culture as a very useful and informative sense."

Marketing researchers have already shown that scents can have a profound effect on consumers, Ms. Lauriault said. An experiment in Montreal found that average spending increased when very subtle amounts of a citrus scent, a combination of lemon, orange, grapefruit and tangerine, were emitted for a week.

It is unclear how people will react to maps that smell, and that's something Ms. Lauriault and Dr. Taylor are hoping to find out through experiments. Allergies could be a concern.

Research also suggests people may respond differently to the same smell. Women recognize smells more accurately then men and are generally more sensitive to odours, Ms. Lauriault and her colleagues note in a recent paper in the journal Cartographica.

As we age, associations to smells become more idiosyncratic, the paper says, and our ability to detect and identify smells decrease. There are also cultural differences. The French love the smell of garlic, but Scandinavians don't.

To start with, the Carleton team will select from the palette of smells offered with the commercially available equipment. But in the future, users may be able to sniff real places and things, the bark of cinnamon tree in Zanzibar, Tanzania, or marshmallows roasting over a campfire on a New Brunswick beach.

Electronic noses positioned all over the world would be able to break down scents into its chemical ingredients, said Dr. Taylor, and could convey that list to a home diffuser, which would replicate smells from near and distant lands.

The noisiest electoral map in the country

As you move your mouse over ridings in the Ottawa area, you hear the leaders of the major federal political parties talking. The volume of each leader's voice is determined by what percentage of the popular vote his or her party's candidate won in that riding.

It can be downloaded here: http://gcrc.carleton.ca/cne/proof_of_concepts/elect2004 , and is the creation of Glenn Brauen, a Carlton University doctoral student working with Fraser Taylor, a pioneer in the field of cybercartography.

Technology is revolutionizing how cartographers work, Dr. Taylor says. He and his colleagues have combined photographs, sounds, images and real-time data from a number of databases, into an atlas of Antarctica that you can see at https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/CAA+Project+Description

Technology is also democratizing mapmaking. People can make their own maps on their home computers using their own photos, videos and sounds to convey their memories and experiences of a place, he says.

It has proved liberating for some aboriginal people he and his colleagues have worked with, says Dr. Taylor, including an Inuit community that made a talking map. You hear elders pronouncing the names, in their own language, Inuktituk, of the places that have been important to their people for generations, but have been overlooked in conventional maps.