I think the iSmell, at least the way it's described in the article, was a terrible idea. Whatever the scent-enabled equivalent of a Rickroll or a goatse link would have been, we're better off without it.
That said, the technology seems kind of cool. The idea that we could define a set of primitive smells, then combine them into any other arbitrary smell is fascinating. If you have the binary data from an image file, and you know how to decode it, you can preserve a photograph forever -- potentially for thousands of years -- with no degradation. It would be really great to be able to preserve scents for posterity in the same way.
We went through this in the 80s with a similar outcome. The root cause of market failure then was consumers deterred by a format war between the compressed odour format, Nosepeg, and the higher fidelity (but patent-encumbered) WIF.
Laser etched quartz or diamond. There was an article about it in the last few years but I cant find it. I'm pretty sure 10,000 years was the time mentioned.
I don't know, but at that point we've left this problem domain and entered a new one: archiving digital data. That sounds like a daunting problem, but one that lots of people and institutions are strongly motivated to solve. If they were to come up with something, it would presumably work as well for digitally-encoded scents as it would for anything else.
I can see niche applications for this type of technology - consider people consigned to a clean room in a hospital, or a Mars habitat, or any other situation with severely limited olfactory experiences.
When it comes to the average consumer, however, I can't see this ever taking off for a couple reasons:
1. Smell is one of our least important senses - while it might help immersion, very little of our information about our world comes through our noses, comparatively speaking. There are many, many subjects that might be improved to provide better immersion than scents, which are, ultimately, optional.
2. On a related note, smell is a less developed sense. The amount of bandwidth our noses provide is massively limited, unlike audio or visual effects. Additionally, multiple smells in a short timeframe will interfere with each other, preventing more complex arrangements. This means there is less design space for creators to use and consumers to experience.
3. Because of this, most people's olfactory needs can be satisfied with less difficulty at a lower cost. Rather than purchasing an expensive device that requires power and refills, you can just get an air freshener. Novelty and variety in smells is much less of a priority than simple maintenance of a pleasant base standard.
In the long term, I'm sure smell simulation will be achieved for VR-style experiences - but almost certainly not through these devices. As long as there's no simulation of motion, or, less importantly, touch, immersion will not be complete enough for lack of smell to be a notable factor. I expect that all three of these senses will become available when we're able to manipulate them more directly - attaching to the nerves, or perhaps via neural implants, as any physical measures for motion or touch are crude and generally ineffective - and that olfactory devices will see negligible success in the meantime, until they're obsoleted.
Smell is highly related to memory, and can trigger vivid recolllections. I can imagine it as a marketer's goldmine. They trigger a happy childhood memory and encourage the purchase of something related.
I actually met a friend of mines recently and unfortunately due to a head injury lost his ability of smell. The doctor’s didn’t realize it and neither did he for quite while till one day he got sick eating fish from his refrigerator that was stale and he couldn’t figure out. So, it definitely plays an important role. On the positive side he doesn't detect any bad odors, but that means he wouldn’t know he is stinking either. He makes sure he is well cologned/deodorant-ized :) Also, he misses the smell of delicious food and other good things!
Human smell seems like it's mostly used for memories, taste and detecting some dangerous odors like rotting food. I can barely taste with my nose plugged.
I still think this could be a useful technology. As long as pages need to request permission to emit a smell (similar to how Chrome currently asks permission for notifications).
If anything, it'd be really cool to smell totally novel things that are unlike any other scent you've experienced.
It seems really incredible to me that this is, and perhaps taste(closely related), we have been unable to tame. Sight, sound, psychology- no problem for the technologically literate to impose on another...but we can't recreate or manipulate smell? fascinating.
We've tamed smell just fine in food and toiletries. It's just that we haven't invented matter replicators yet, so you can't just push electrons into a box and get arbitrary chemicals out.
> perhaps taste(closely related), we have been unable to tame
Really? How do you think they make the most junk of food still palatable enough that people aren't literally barfing while eating, say, a pizza that doesn't even have real cheese but a mediocre imitation of it?
Or things like this :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethyl_methylphenylglycidate
used in various cheap industrial food products like ice creams and syrups. Entirely artificial and synthesized imitation of strawberry.
We have deciphered taste down to infinite combinations of various synthetic compounds to replicate, although not to perfection, pretty much any sort of taste, which is why there is a junk food epidemic. People wouldn't be able to gorge themselves onto the road of becoming morbidly obese if artificial flavourings were not up to a decent, although not gourmet-level, standard.
There is no such thing as strawberry taste. What you feel is actually strawberry smell. Also apple banana cola etc. These are smells that you feel by eating. Try eating something while holding your nose shut with your hand. According to Wikipedia we have only five tastes:
The sensation of taste includes five established basic tastes: sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and savoriness.
They had a booth at the 1999 Game Developers Conference with scantily dressed young women in skunk costumes. They tried to convince me that The Sims should support smell, because the iSmell would enrich the user experience of all those blue puddles of piss on the floor, stopped up toilets in the bathroom, and plates of rotting food with flies buzzing around on the dining room table.
Classic Marc Canter interview. I'm surprised they could smell the output of the iSmell USB device over the pungent bouquet from all the joints he was smoking.
I am pretty sure smell would be incredibly useful for advertisement. Not sure I would like it though.
I wait until some algorithm accidentally mismatches a vegetarian with Hard 7 BBQ. That would be an interesting lawsuit.
Regarding the failure, Brain wave input as well as VR are actively developed. Touch/feedback interfaces have been common in consoles for ages. But smell is kind of underrepresented.
There is this though: https://kotaku.com/tecmo-is-making-dead-or-alive-you-can-sme...
It has to be said, though, that sometimes the public does not know WHAT they want, before they actually see a working efficient product. I mean, just look at the VR devices picture in the article. If the only info execs ever had was that, VRs would have never arrived to the market.
The critical question is obviously: can you make such a good product that the public actually changes its mind?!
It seems like this idea is fully capable of generating billions in revenues, but just wasn't able to get past the technological roadblocks. I would be willing to pay for nice smells where I wouldn't pay for songs or other media.
In the Soarin' ride at DisneyWorld, when you dip down to fly over the elephants, you smell "elephant". It's very powerful to add smell to a visual. That said random smells on a website is probably more like to horrify.
The opportunity for trolling is endless, people looking to smell "strawberries" would instead end up smelling other things... B.O. , farts you name it. I wish the iSmell actually had succeeded, too bad.
That said, the technology seems kind of cool. The idea that we could define a set of primitive smells, then combine them into any other arbitrary smell is fascinating. If you have the binary data from an image file, and you know how to decode it, you can preserve a photograph forever -- potentially for thousands of years -- with no degradation. It would be really great to be able to preserve scents for posterity in the same way.