Smells And Whistles - DigiScents' DigiScents ismell - Product Announcement

Industry Standard, The, Oct 2, 2000 by Ethan Smith

MOST PEOPLE HAVE NEVER KNOWN the joy of being in an olfactory EVE lab," says Stuart Firestein. For those who don't know what they've been missing, there is a whiff of hope.

Firestein, a Columbia University neurobiologist, is discussing "the future of digital scent communication" at the computer industry's very first "olfaction summit." Like his fellow panelists, Firestein sits on the board of DigiScents, the Oakland, Calif., startup hosting the event, and believes the world would be a far better place if smells were added to odor-neutral experiences such as shopping online and playing videogames.

To that end, DigiScents is unveiling the second-generation prototype of a "scent speaker" known as iSmell. The unfortunately named device can generate hundreds, if not thousands, of smells by combining 50 base scents housed in what looks like an oversize inkjet-printer cartridge.

Apart from perfume inserts in magazines, the last major scented media undertaking was John Waters' 1981 film Polyester, which was presented in "Odorama" - a spinoff of the low-tech scratch 'n' sniff platform. Since then, consumers haven't exactly been clamoring for odor-enabled Web browsing.

But Avery Gilbert, DigiScents VP of sensory research and development, contends that a new kind of multimedia will blossom through "the magic of smell - the immediacy, the sensuality, the emotion." The company even hopes to introduce the public to the creative possibilities of mixing and matching odors, a new art form they've dubbed "scentology."

After the panel's presentation, audience members are invited to try out the technology. Clicking through a demo program designed to show off iSmell's many possibilities, a DigiScents engineer first demonstrates an online-grocery-shopping mockup, where clicking on an orange juice container fills the air with a sweet, identifiably orangy smell. A fabric softener elicits a sweet, though less identifiably fabric-softenery aroma. And a "honey cake" (the demo was created by DigiScents' Israeli office) produces a generic sweet odor. Later, in a free-form scent-mixing mode, iSmell creates surprisingly accurate renditions of smoke, damp earth and grass - which get combined into a "cave" smell that accompanies a clip from the computer game Myst.

For the moment, true tele-olfaction - in which an artificial nose could automatically digitize scent information and transmit it in real time to a remote location - remains just a dream. Even so, DigiScents scientists say they won't limit their offerings to nose-pleasing, flowery aromas.

"We're doing the smell of decay and trash and everything' says Gilbert, the R&D chief. "Life is about germinating and decay' And such a bleak-seeming strategy could tap into the highly sought after game-playing demographic. "Naturally," adds Firestein, "15-year-old boys will want burning rubber and farts."