No doubt your friends are as busy sharing their food snaps on Instagram as ours. And no doubt you're therefore as perpetually Pavlovian dog-style hungry as we are. Now, we don't know how we'd cope if those pictures came with real, baked-in food fragrances. Yet that's the elevator pitch for a new, prototype smell-capturing camera.

Li Jingxuan's prototype Polaroid bundles everything necessary to make an aromatic photo into a compact handheld unit. It would combine an electronic nose, with an instant inkjet-style printing system; dappling the photos with the scents detected by the electronic nose. The concept is certainly novel and a deserving recipient of Sony's approval (Li won the Sony China Creative Centre's 'most fun' award).

Smell remains the great unconquered territory of experiential media – mostly because it's difficult to combine fragrant oils in a manner that accurately reflects the source scent. This could be one reason that building everything into the one unit is holding back further development of the prototype. Or it could just be that they're distracted by their resultant perpetual hunger.

We're also wondering about the association with Polaroids: given the power of aroma to stimulate memory, is this prototype missing a trick with the camera's inherent immediacy? Perhaps uploading the scent metadata and associated photo to the cloud and partnering with a central production line of odour-enhanced postcards might be a better way forward. We know people enjoyed sending our Samsung Galaxy Lovenote postcards across the globe. So just think what an army of food Aromastagram-armed bloggers could do for the urban restaurant circuit.