Click & Sniff! - DigiScents iSmell smell generator - Company Business and Marketing

Computer Technology Review, April, 2000 by Mark Brownstein

After more than two decades working with personal computing, a lot of things seem to have become pretty clear. For example, the whiz bang, state of the art product (whatever it is) will lose its attractiveness and value pretty fast. With the exception of speakers, and, possibly, monitors, there aren't any quantum leaps in technology that compel most users to upgrade until these devices fail or start behaving badly.

Another truth is that, the more revolutionary a product may potentially become, the fewer people really "get it," in the beginning. Such was the case with the CD-ROM. Unlike most people, I "got it" in the early days, seeing it as a medium for distribution of data and applications. Another one that was hard for many to understand was the sound card. In the days when all you needed to understand what your computer was doing were a few beeps, the idea of a card that can play and record music and voice seemed pretty exotic--at least, this was the case at the magazine where I worked at the time.

Video is another area where improvements didn't seem to be all that important. EGA was considered pretty high resolution--after all, how many colors did it take to display text? How small a character can a person read? The idea of using a computer monitor for photo quality images was foreign and unnecessary to people accustomed to low resolution green or amber monitors and were just getting used to 256 colors on screen.

Sound and Video appealed to our senses and used the sense of hearing and sight to interact with the computer. Today, we're poised on another technology that may sound similarly bizarre, but can have tremendous impact on future computing: The sense of smell.

Don't laugh, but there's a technology of scent generation, controlled by computer. The technology is being demonstrated at Spring Internet World with an expected availability date for some of the components in April or May. Product should begin trickling out mid-year.

A company called DigiScents developed the scent generator, called iSmell. It uses a cartridge, similar to an inkjet print cartridge, that contains more than 100 scents that can be mixed or used separately. In small quantities, the user can easily identify these. When mixed, these generators can produce a wide variety of smells, ranging from the very pleasant to the unpleasant or unsmellable.

The method of creating target aromas was described by a company spokesman as similar to inkjet printing--instead of ink, the component scents are released into a mixing chamber, where a fan then sends the mixed fragrances into the room. Digiscents is building a library of combinations representing a broad palette of smells. DigiScents has made an SDK available to developers.

Applications for this technology can be easily imagined. Imagine a "Sewers of Paris" computer game with an appropriate olfactory amplification. Imagine a shoot-em-up game where the smell of gunfire is a key component. Imagine visiting a website for a perfume retailer who allows you to sample a fragrance before you order it.

What may seem less obvious are the more useful applications. Consider a few examples. When you start a system backup, the computer produces a scent of oranges. During backup, no scents are produced. At the end of a successful backup, the strong smell of pineapple is generated until the administrator turns it off. Immediately, without having to look at a monitor, you can tell the status of a backup process, simply by inhaling, if the backup fails, a somewhat different, and unpleasant, aroma can be generated. If you start a backup, smelling oranges, and return to a room smelling of boiling cabbage, it won't take a wizard to realize something's wrong.

Olfactory cues and aromatic feedback can quickly and easily report on system status--as long as you know what the scents mean. Conceivably, unique scents, not occurring in nature, can be generated to provide all types of messages. If developers create a standard set of aromas, each easily distinguished from anything else and each having its own meaning, immediate status messages can be produced. You can turn your back on the monitor and still get updated status reports. The visually challenged may be even more capable of detecting these signals than sighted users. With an increasing number of devices using embedded browsers and Internet Protocol monitors, you should be able to log in to your backup device, NAS, SAN, or whatever and smell how the system is doing.

The sense of smell is an interesting one, being more primal than vision or hearing. In some ways, it may be a more direct connection to the brain than the other senses and has the power to trigger emotional responses that only smell and taste can do.

The point here is that the sense of smell is a long neglected sense that can, finally, be used to amplify and extend the functionality of computers. DigiScents, although it may sound pretty strange, may have a real winner. It will be interesting to revisit this technology in a few years to see if my initial observation that the most revolutionary technologies are often the least understood is right.