Brits Still Working on Stinky Email

prostoalex writes "British Internet provider Telewest Broadband is testing a system, which allows people to attach specific smells to their e-mail. It works with air freshener cartridge that one plugs into PC. The technology is developed by a US-based company Trisenx, which features the products and pricing on its Web site. A 20-channel serial port device costs $269, the same price for optional software package allowing the user to author specific smells. The replacement cartridges are $48 each." They're hardly the first attempt at adding smell to the computer experience. Digiscent didn't work out so well.

I am horrified to..

think what the porn industry could do with this?

Re:I am horrified to..

and I'm slightly aroused by what the porn industry could do with this.

Re:I am horrified to..

It would, however, be great for cooking/recipe sites. Or hell....would be great for FoodTV..

Re:I am horrified to..

Think of the new viruses which will exploit this.
The new and dangerous worm W32.MyCrap.Stnch@mm

Re:I am horrified to..

It might finally train the clueless to not open every attachment in email. Memories linked to smells are apparently the most persistant. If that doesn't work, then some kind of I/O gadget involving electrodes to body parts might be required.

Re:I am horrified to..

Ya, or just hope that no one wishes you a Merry Christmas with a Mr. Hankey.

Re:I am horrified to..

think what the porn industry could do with this?

I'm a little more concerned about what goatse.cx guy will, er, come with...

Re:I am horrified to..

Wife: [sniff sniff] Have you been visiting porn sites again?

Hubby: No dear, I'm cooking salmon tonight.

Garg

Wait a sec... Have we gone back in time?

Are we back in 1999? Because if we are, I've got a really good business plan to show you...

I've got this device that makes smells, which will interoperate well with the 3D VRML interweb. The only trick with this thing is reaching critical mass of eyeballs - no, scratch that, noseholes - so we'll have to give them out for free, and eat the GBP250 ($464 - yes, you read that right, that's what this thing costs - can you believe it's so cheap!) How, you ask. Simple. We'll get advertisers to pay for it! Quote: "Telewest say it could be used by supermarkets to tempt people with the smell of fresh bread or by holiday companies seeking to stir up images of sun-kissed beaches.

I forsee no problems whatsoever.

Spam

Personally, I don't want to know what sort of smell would be associated with penis enlargement spam...

Re:Spam

"Personally, I don't want to know what sort of smell would be associated with penis enlargement spam..."

Must... resist... yo mama.... joke....

Money...

For smelling, the price stinks too! ;)

Smells like fraudulant claims to me...

Why on earth would someone want to pay $250 so that they can smell their spam mail? Come on people, someone answer me that? Furthermore, I am troubled by a quote in the article: Telewest says its "scent dome" could cost around 250 and would only work with a high-speed, broadband connection.. So what they are saying is that the unit can produce up to 60 smells (that's 6 bits of data), and I need a broadband connection to get that data? I don't buy it. (pardon the pun)

Re:Smells like fraudulant claims to me...

Why on earth would anyone view images in an email, or blindly open attachments?

*sigh* Why cant email just be email? I've been able to evoke a wide range of emotions with email over the years and I have yet to have used HTML mail, background or any other image, sounds, colors, or smells. I'm surely not going to pay $250 in hardware for this "feature" either.

send a fart to microsoft

Great. Anybody who wants to can send a fart to Microsoft. I can imagine Redmond would very soon start to stink to high heaven.

What smell would you send to Darl?

Re:send a fart to microsoft

"What smell would you send to Darl?"

Is Cowboy Neil an option?

Why?

Am I just missing it, or is there no possible use for such a device? What would it do that anyone would pay $300 for one?

Re:Why?

What would it do that anyone would pay $300 for one?

Well, I vaguely remember scientific studies indicating that human memory of scent is much stronger than any other sense, and with better retention. Theoretically, given enough resolution (enough "different" smells), you could odorize threads of messages to be the same, so that when reading new messages on the same topic, the previous content comes to mind more rapidly and accurately.

Chance of this actually being a practical feature? Slim-to-nonesville, population: None.

Re:Why?

Well, it would be kind of interesting to add a smell factor to first-person-shooters. "Look out, I smell bad guys", or "I think there's some food over that way."

Artistically, an accompanying scent would serve the same purpose as a soundtrack: to set a mood. The smell of smoke and ozone would be a cool accompaniment to an FPS. Or putting a bit of perfume on a love letter: a distinctive aroma can be highly evocative.

Admittedly, I'm not paying $300 for either of those things.

Re:Why?

If something in a game triggered a smell then this device would release some aroma. You move to a different part of the game, but your room still smells like the previous part of the game because you move through the game much faster than the aroma disapates. When you go to a different part of the game another smell comes out. Soon your room is filled with a combination of smells which tell you nothing. This device is stupid and pointless. I have absolutely no desire for my computer to produce smells. That's just dumb. If these devices are ever actually released, I can see every one of them showing up in a thrift shop in about ten years.

Why are the Brits doing this?

Eh, this is really outside their area of expertise. They should pass this problem off to the French and instead work on making email flavorless and rubbery.

Je blague, mes amis...

Re:Why are the Brits doing this?

Perhaps British cuisine would have a better reputation if they didn't name them things like "Toad in the Hole" and "Bangers".

Re:Why are the Brits doing this?

Who says that UK food isn't good? We have excellent pizzas, curries, chinese, and kebabs.
Actually, 3 of the top 20 restaurants in the world are in the UK [bbc.co.uk].

Re:Why are the Brits doing this?

Evidentally, you've eaten at different places to me. The following foods are what I would consider "Uniquely British":

1. Fish and Chips, actually the best part of this are the chips - REAL potatoes deep fried in lard! The fish (cod or haddock usually) is also deep fried in batter. Most Fish and Chip shops server sausages, hamburgers and, for the very very brave, some have snickers bars deep fried in batter.

2. Roast dinners. Go to a local tavern on Sunday, enjoy some of the best roast meat you've ever had. Make sure you try the Yorkshire Pudding.

3. Toad in the Hole. Yorkshire pudding with sausages. The Americans have something similar but only about half as good called "pigs in the blanket".

4. Cornish Pasties. Minced beef with vegetables (and spices if you're lucky) wrapped in flaky pastry. Yum!

Curry is becoming well known as the True National Dish of England, even though it's not technically truly English (who cares, anyway?). The Indian food you eat in England is the best in the world.

No way.

Part of the beauty of email is that I don't _have_ to smell someone to communicate with them. Being as I work in software development, this is a big plus.

There has been brighter ideas than this.

The sense of smell is perhaps the most diverse when it comes to preferences. Just think of all the colognes/perfumes out there that end up delivering the opposite effect. Unless you know exactly what the user likes, giving them a scented email may look creative but runs the risk at the same time of offending the receiver.

Makes filtering spam easier.

Porn Spam would have a very specific smell to it. If you could do the same thing with web pages, a lot of people would get in trouble when the wife went sniffing around the computer.

If we could do this with packet level traffic it would give a whole new meaning to a network sniff (Yes sir, I suspected the router because it smelled like the homeless man outside your building.)

Video Games

While this is a Whacky technology, it could ad alot VR games like quake or Half-Life or even D&D style games.

Re:Video Games

Given the amount of time I spend trudging around in the sewers in your average 3D shooter, I think I'll pass on this technology. At least until Doom4: Field of Flowers is released.

Fun with your friends

Hmm... send that fresh bakery smell to your Atkins buddies.

picture in the article

I love the picture of the "typical user" in the article. She's got a nice portable laptop, plus this huge aroma thing that looks like it's too bulky to fit in any laptop bag. Did she bring the laptop and connect the device in case she got a smelly email? Or did she have to go and get the device when she realized she had gotten a smelly email?

Plus, she's eating - her taste/smell senses are already being used. So, now she's eating musk-perfume-flavored stawberries, and we're expected to believe that this is enjoyable? Pretty picture, yes. But poor marketing.

Also: "Telewest says its "scent dome" could cost around 250 and would only work with a high-speed, broadband connection." -- WTF? The device produces only 60 smells - so is 6 bits now too big to send over a slow modem?

Bad email

Great, as if your idiot uncle wasn't bad enough at family get-togethers, you can now look forward to emails that read:

Pull my finger

new slogan

sex smells!

Digital smells

We've had jokes about smell-o-vision for about as long as we've had television. I guess the modern update is applying smells to e-mail. The consumer applications are a bit questionable, but there is an interesting scientific level below this...

In order to transfer a smell from place A to place B, we need a notation scheme that can combine various levels of a small number of "elemental" smells, just like RGB are the elemental colors of light and CMYK are the elemental colors of pigment.

Once there are devices that can take a smell, store it in the digital notation, and then reproduce it, the bottom is going to fall out purfume industry quick...

Drug Dome?

How about sending your loved ones a quick hit of LSD, or a tab of e, or maybe the scent of pot for a nice 'contact high' ? The new Drug Dome comes with 20 lab-quality chemical compounds which can be combined to form 60 separate drugs. Co-worker feeling a little anxious about a presentation? Email him a quaalude. Girlfriend not putting out? Send her a couple of tabs of e.

For the record, rumors that the Drug Dome has been hacked to dispense a single blast of all 20 drugs at once are false.

We are currently beta-testing a refillable Drug Dome, using a modified Linux kernel (Methix), the chemicals, their mixtures, and dosages can be completely customized by the end user.

Flashback

Am I dreaming? This is like something from the dotcom boomtimes when an idea got more money for seeming wacky and apparently useless.

Human don't use smell very much, anymore. For the most part, it's just figuring out whether the milk is OK to drink, or if the person next to you needs a bath. There are subconscious pheromonal responses, but hopefully they aren't loading this thing up with those. "Yes sir, we discovered the 'buy stuff' pheromone."

Three hundred bucks to have a machine spray a grocery-aisle's worth of air fresheners.

Maybe if we were as smell-focused as dogs, we'd be able to use this as a form of output. HEY! You could assign words different mixes of smells, and train your dog to delete spam!

RealAroma

Sadly, the realaroma.com [realaroma.com] site is down, but the wayback machine still has it [archive.org].

The picture of the SmellU-SmellMe software is priceless.

Good lord, does this really date to 1996? "I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." -- T.S. Eliot.

This would be awesome...

...and I'll bet that somebody's already working on an Emacs syntax highlighting mode that produces different smells based on C types.

Mmmmmmm, unsigned ints....

Maybe using string functions without bounds checking could smell really bad. Then you could really sniff out the bugs. Neat!

You may as well...

...just glue a slice of spam to your nose and be done with it.

DigiScents iSmell Digital Scent Technology

Coincidentally, I'm wearing my dirty old "iSmell" swag t-shirt, as I type this. Be glad you can't smell it...

About 5 years ago, DigiScents [archive.org] developed a product called the iSmell, which was covered by Wired Magazine [wired.com]. It was even on the memoriable cover [wired.com]. They hired Marc Canter [canter.com] to be their visionary spokesguru:

In Bellenson's apartment, Marc Canter has been lying on a postmodern faux-leopard-skin couch with his eyes half closed, listening as Bellenson and Smith outline their grand vision. He rouses himself now, like a lugubrious guru, a veteran of more than half a dozen projects pushing the state of the art. He wishes to make a statement about trends that lie ahead.

"There is a new paradigm for tools," he says. "In the old days, they were shrink-wrapped pieces of software; you sat down and read the manual and used the tool. Nowadays, the tools are free. And what we need are scalable content tools. Look at Hollywood: They take a movie and amortize the cost among multiple forms, from cable TV to toys. On the Web, we haven't been able to do that, because it's just a delivery medium. But if all the content can be decoupled" - in other words, if it can exist separately from any particular format - "I can output a low-end Web site, a medium-res CD-ROM, and a high-end broadband version, all from the same ideas. In the smell world, this means 16-pack cartridges that do only a few smells, or big systems that do thousands."

"We expect to have low-end and high-end iSmell hardware," Smith agrees. "The low end may retail for under $200. The smell cartridges - even at the high end - will probably cost under $50." With moderate use, he guesses, they should last a few months.

"The key, as always, is the installed base," Canter says. "But there's so many different target markets. It'll be easy to get overwhelmed. You'll need a staff of 15 people just to answer the phones. We'll do the usual things - developers' kits, conferences, seminars, T-shirts, hats, all that stuff." The prospect seems to overcome him with ennui, yet he appears convinced it will work.

[...] "I think aesthetic disclaimers will be more important," adds Canter. "You know, when PageMaker was first released, it created a lot of really ugly pages. I'll be surprised if 10 percent of the first smell output is bearable."

This is, after all, a totally new art form.

"We know when the first visual art was done, in cave paintings," Canter continues. "And the first musical art consisted of tribal people beating drums. Think of all the books written about musical and visual arts since then. Now show me the library on smells."

They even had an SDK for programming the device. I talked with them at the game developers conference about a game I was working on that might benefit from smell. They thought it would be more fun, if you could smell when The Sims needed to take a shower, pissed their pants, or set the house on fire.

For some reason, DigiScent's iSmell Digital Scent Technology never took off.

-Don

Not worst...but how do you sell it?

I wouldn't call it the worst idea ever, but it does stink of bad business plan. How are you supposed to make money selling these things? Who's going to pay two hundred seventy dollars for the "convenience" of letting someone across the internet burn through the fragrance in a fifty dollar scent cartridge?

What's the target market for this thing?