Editor's Weekly Ramblings 131

March 24th 2006

Smell-e-mail

Photo courtesy of Trisenx Scent domes attached to your computer could transmit an e-mailed smell.

When I lived in Montreal, a noodle restaurant near my house used to pump out a smell that instantly made me hungry and lead to way too many noodle soup dinners that year. It made me realize what a simple and powerful advertising tool smell can be. I bet most of that restaurant's business came from people walking by that patch of sidewalk and being drawn in by the irresistible aroma - either then and there or later on whenever they contemplated going to the restaurant.

My mind tried to wander back to science but I was still craving noodle soup and it made me wonder why the media industry hadn't yet capitalized on smell. Imagine a food commercial pumping out the scent of baking brownies or a movie where you can actually smell what's happening… That would truly be virtual reality.

I'm definitely not the first to think of it. In 1960, Mike Todd Jr., the son of showman Mike Todd, used his inheritance to develop Smell-O-Vision: a system where smell could be propagated to the audience in a cinema at relevant moments in the film. The process involved bottles of scent on a rotating drum that were channelled through pipes to individual seats in the theatre by a signal on the film strip. Sounds revolutionary, but it didn't prove to be very popular since Todd lost his entire fortune to the business.

In the last few years, ventures have turned towards developing a way to transmit smells over the internet. In 2000, an American company called DigiScent developed a piece of hardware called iSmell that consisting of a fan wafting over small vials of oil that could produce a range of odours by combining a few primary scents. The actual smell could be transmitted by code, similarly to how colours can be defined by hexadecimal values, which would be interpreted and synthesized by the piece of hardware. The low end version was expected to cost under $200.