A sniff of the future
theage.com.au
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Friday 22 September 2000
The nose: Treated as a third-class citizen, is finally getting the attention it deserves.
Picture: CATHRYN TREMAIN
I have been to the future and it smells. It smells like ... But I'm getting ahead of myself.
For centuries, technology has struggled to catch up with human perception. The eye perceives motion, but, until the 20th century, mankind made do with static representations of the visual field. The ear hears, but the first recordings did not come along until the late 19th century and films were silent until the 1920s. And what about the nose?
The nose, treated as a third-class citizen, is finally getting the attention it deserves. And for food lovers, it's none too soon.
The nasal perspective was given its due last week at a panel discussion and demonstration organised by DigiScents, a company in Oakland, California, that sees the Internet as one huge smelly online opportunity. If its vision of the future is correct, every PC will come with a plugin apparatus that wafts odors in the general direction of the user's nose. You download images and sound. Why not smell?
Last Monday, a thundering herd of experts gathered in the Nose Room of Trattoria dell'Arte, in Midtown, ostensibly to thrash out the olfactory issues but actually to plug the company's smell machine, iSmell.
Two messages came across loud and clear. First, iSmell is a wonderful thing and a boon to humankind. Perhaps not as important as the wheel, but much more fun. Second, the human olfactory system is enormously complex, underserved by industry and a potential gold mine. Avery Gilbert, the vicepresident for sensory research and development at DigiScents, pointed out that nonolfactory perception gets routed to the hypothalamus and then on to the cortex for further analysis, while smells proceed directly to the areas of the brain responsible for emotions and memories. Just wait for the smells of fear and success.
After the visionary talk was over, the audience headed off to a demonstration of iSmell. By this point, I more or less understood the principles.
The magic machine contains a cassette with a "palette" of 128 chemical odors that can be combined to generate an almost infinite number (actually, 10 to the 120th power) of smells by software programmed with mathematical models of specific odors. Users, by clicking on a mouse, can manipulate the mixture of scents to create a signature perfume or simply create new, weird smells (and email them). Or they can summon up a specific smell corresponding to an image on the screen, or passively receive the smells encoded in, say, a game.
I could feel deep scepticism seeping into my every pore as the futurefest proceeded. SmellOVision was supposed to transform the moviegoing experience, too. Where is it now? But sharper minds than mine have sniffed at the new technology and they are not laughing. Procter & Gamble, for example, recently signed an agreement with DigiScents to share research. And other companies are following the Internet scent trail.
AromaJet.com is working with videogame companies to add smell as a sensory component to their products. A company called TriSenx has developed scentproducing hardware, MultiSSENX, that it plans to sell for less than $25. It has also developed a product called FirstSENX that allows users to print scent sheets on cards or apply flavors to a thin sheet of potato starch.
The implications for the food industry are mindboggling. Shopping online for truffles or barbecue sauce or fancy coffee could be a multidimensional experience. Restaurants could add aroma to their online menus. When a chef throws garlic into the pan on a cooking show, viewers would not only hear it sizzle but smell it, too.
There were two iSmells to try. An early version looked like a clock radio minus the face and dials. A long copper tube with a nozzle at the end snaked over the box, ready to broadcast odor. I looked at a screen, where a woman was pouring orange juice into a glass. A puff of air blew across my face, bearing the unmistakable aroma of orange juice. There was a faintly alcoholic undertone, as though it were an orange perfume rather than a real orange, but the orangeness was there.
Onscreen, the scene shifted. I was now entering a cave. A cave that smelled like oranges. That was the problem with early iSmell: an inability to shift gears quickly. Smoothing out that glitch led to secondgeneration iSmell, a black box that looks a little like an electric pencil sharpener outfitted with the tube from a bronchial inhaler. The screen showed an online supermarket, with the different departments represented by icons. I clicked on pastry, then on a pecan pie. It smelled like a banana. Was this a bananapecan pie? I tried chocolate chip cookies. Banana again.
Three possibilities suggested themselves. First, a banana was hiding among the pastries. Second, I suffered from a disorder in which sugar of any kind triggered a banana response. Third, it's extremely difficult to reproduce certain families of smells. Fear, yes. A chocolate chip? Perhaps not in our lifetime.
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