Want to celebrate your faraway friend with a sniff of fresh-baked birthday cake? Wake up a sleepy dorm daughter with the scent of coffee or oranges? It’s still a Jetsons-style dream for regular folks to send scents across the miles, but researchers at the Ohio State University are bringing us closer. They’ve developed a new system capable of detecting and transmitting smells across vast distances.

That system, outlined in a study released Wednesday, includes two different devices. First, an AI-powered e-nose detects and analyzes an odor. Then, it sends that scent data to a receiver called a Scentronic, which recreates the smell for someone else.

The team created a few versions of the Scentronic, including a wristband, a handheld model and a necklace. Each one is equipped with a five-channel scent distributor that uses a piezoelectric atomizer to spray the scents.…