Slashdot Mirror
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.
think what the porn industry could do with this?
Personally, I don't want to know what sort of smell would be associated with penis enlargement spam...
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
For smelling, the price stinks too! ;)
DrkBr
What smell would you send to Darl?
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?
Je blague, mes amis...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Just what I want when I receive an email from rms is to *smell* him too.
This technology would be more useful in France.
Who would want their computer spraying smelly stuff, whenever it felt like it - whether the smell was good or bad. I don't think it would ever smell good, anyway - it would always smell artificial - just like all the air fresheners that are supposed to smell like flowers. Too perfumy for me.
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.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
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.
And no expensive cartridges to replace. Anyone up for Broccoli and Egg Salad?
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.)
www.voiceofthehive.com - Beekeeping and Honeybees for those who don't.
While this is a Whacky technology, it could ad alot VR games like quake or Half-Life or even D&D style games.
wanted: one clever sig,apply within
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?
Hmm... send that fresh bakery smell to your Atkins buddies.
I love how all of their examples uses are things like "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."
Explain to me why I'd want to use up my $48 dollar stink cartidge (heh) on spam?
...just like chicken.
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?
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
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)
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
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
sex smells!
btw, this is meant to be a funny....
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...
A 20-channel serial port device costs $269
... what the hell were they thinking, using legacy ports only? It's not like aiming at an ever shrinking customer base (laptops or Macs come to mind as machines w/o legacy ports) was bad business... ;p
Apart from the horrendous price tag and the questionable need for suche a device...
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.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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!
...
Sadly, the realaroma.com site is down, but the wayback machine still has it.
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.
Imagine broadband providers requiring you to have one of these to access their service. You don't pay for it up front, they just charge you $5/month to have it, like they do with modems now. Cartridges are provided dirt cheap. Then broadband providers sell access to their customers to spammers, who pay a little bit per message to get to the broadband customers with enhanced stinky email. Providers start raking in big bucks. You become another commodity they can sell to increase profits.
We know the whole system
1. Hook customers on your service
2. Sell them out for advertising
3. Profit
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.
...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!
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Just like the Colon-Cat Company, let them burn through their cash giving away this garbage for free, then pick 'em up by the bushel in about 18 months.
Yeah, right.
We can just hope that this doesn't show up in the next upgraded version of goatse.cx.
Not so at all. Smell is actually a *very* big component of taste. Taste and Smell
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
...just glue a slice of spam to your nose and be done with it.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
About 5 years ago, DigiScents developed a product called the iSmell, which was covered by Wired Magazine. It was even on the memoriable cover. They hired Marc Canter to be their visionary spokesguru:
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
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.