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The Aroma of Fine Wine From Your Computer
SonomaSteve writes "Wine Spectator Magazine is reporting on a new computer accessory that could have you smelling fine Burgundy wine over the web. The prototype, called Olfacom, is being developed by France Telecom and showcased by the Bureau Interprofessionnel des Vins de Bourgogne (BIVB.) The technology uses 'essential oils' stored in several tanks inside the peripheral to generate aromas like hay, flowers and fruit. Will Olfacom be more successful than DigiScents? The French say, 'Mais, oui!'"
Imagine the applications in porn!
Actually, it would probably result in some shocking realizations for most geeks.
Back in the early 90's wasn't the U.S. Navy doing research like this in conjunction with their virtual reality research programs going on at the China Lake Naval base in California?
Talk about adding a whole new level to the Goatse experience!
Sigs for Nerds. Sigs that Matter.
Smellevision...and here I thought it would always be a bad joke from the 80s...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I've heard about these types of devices quite a few times before. Infact I think the first time I heard about something like this TechTV was still known as ZDTV.
It's pretty obvious that it didn't work out before, I'm not sure why they're still trying.
it can mix the wine perfectly from some basic ingredients available cheaply.
can't see the wine buffs falling for this though..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I have lost count of all these gadgets. Every other month, some geekish junior entrepreneur comes up with the idea to put a few oils in a box and connect them to a modified bubble-jet printer's head.
First: How should this ever really work? There are millions of scents out there and our noses are really sensitive organs. How should five or ten different oils be able to reproduce all the variations? Remember, we are not talking of different frequencies of one single quality (as with light) but of really different substances. One cannot mix scents as on mixes colors.
Second: Even given it would work: Does anyone want such a thingy? Just wait till the first script kid out there writes a worm that fills half of the world's office cubicles with the nice smell of, [insert your favorite salacity here].
This has to be one of the longest running pieces of vaporware around. I've had to have ssen various articles about this type of technology for at least 5 years, with no products in sight.
The Technonaut
Let that crazy brother use this during a video chat from accross the country when he decides that a pull my finger joke is in order.
Non!
KFG
It's not nice to tease people with the aromas of fine wine and leave it at that. We want to be able to taste it too!
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
Now I can email spammers back with a fresh scented fart!
Sign me up.
and that this was already decided to not be something of much usage...? i cant imagine a hoarde of things i'd use it for, but i'm sure marketing has something in mind.
~~par
If you end up being able to replicate the smell of a good wine by mixing a couple of chemicals together (like you would with toner), I'm sure that many wineries would like the recipe. After all, they could cut costs by just using some non-toxic additive to their wine as well, right?
No - this would be a handy companion to an emailed "flaming bag of dogshit" pic, but for items with a high quality aroma, I wouldn't hold your breath.
I have odor reconstruction hardware, but people always send me .wif files!
Unfortunately it accepts only compressed Nosepeg.
Socom X, don't just hear your buddies, get to smell them too....
Including genuine "rotting corpse" smell when you make a kill.
Then again the smell of grass as you walk onto the football pitch would be superb.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
...if you're a dog.
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
...Smell-O-Vision *was* a short-lived movie fad in 1960. During the 50s in particular the movie industry tried lots of gimmicks (e.g. 3D) to counter the rising popularity of TV. The only one that really took hold (unfortunately in the view of many directors) was widescreen. One would think that all the people pursuing computer smell attachments would have learned from that experience.
one word: pr0n
indeed, it might be interesting to experiment with additional pheromone tanks. w3c would need to extend css with olfactory properties..
is an inverse peripheral (scent detector) in development somewhere?
we discovered a new way to think.
But shouldn't it be sectioned under here?
...really, it stinks. I can smell that thang here from France.
/.er farted?
-- "ok, which one of you
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
For more details and references about the technology behind Olfacom, including videos from France Telecom, you can read a recent entry on my blog, "Sweet Smell of Wine."
one thing I've always felt is that it would be impossible for france to be any MORE gay.
technology is always proving me wrong.
H2S virus/ worm targets vulnerable WINDOWS machines on the internet and causing the infected machines to reboot and releasing a small does H2S (a large dose of it will desensitize your olfactory) whenever the machine is connected to the internet.
Oh, it smells ...
I have wanted one since the first time I watched the movie Harold and Maude... I heard of this 'vapour ware' no pun intended before along with catch phrases such as "Movie Theatre", "Radio" and now "Computer". I usually have a pretty good nose for things that smell off, and this one is shooting fragerance to the back of my skull like I had breathed water up my nose. If it does happen to waft its way into stores, at least I will be able to send George Carlin my very own fart joke.
flinging poop since 1969
Put them all together, and what do you get?
A swapless machine that runs as fast as a dog wagon and stinks.
Your Mom
I thought the French said "Go away or I shall mock you a second time".
Damn Monty python, next people will tell me theres no giant foot crushing things.
--- [Insert intresting Sig here]
Merde!
;-)
Sorry, it's the only french word I know
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
No it wont be more successful
Smell add-ons are like flying cars - we can do it but no one wants it
Its not ironic, meaningful or in anyway interesting that "To a computer, the fragrance of a rose or a pine cone becomes just another group of zeros and ones"
Computer games dont need smell and hardcore gamers wont give a crap
No one will agree on a standard
People wont buy one just to take a wine tour especially when it cant even do the bloody wine smell!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I've Combined the cooling system of my PC with a beer making kit, so I can new brew my own beer at the same time as my PC is being overclocked.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I swear I first read "Olfacom" as "Ofalcom". And I thought, "Yeah, that oughta sell real well..."
I must contribute that "Mais oui" is frequently used with the meaning : "No ways". As for smell, it cannot be decomposed in just a small dimension vector. You may need literrally thousands of basic smells, some of them very costly and unstable. France Telecom has once again wasted our precious socialist budget in pointless pseudo-public-serving R&D. They should have given this money to me. I would have done research in geographic database with it. -- The scientists are your friends. Trust the scientists.
... queue the fart jokes!
Classic song line brought to a PC near you. Why? Wait 'til the script kiddie crowd starts writing virii for MS boxes that hurl rotten eggs (and worse) at you randomly, or when you visit MS properties. Oh yeah, Hotmail will smell just fine!
"you oughta get a whiff of RealAroma, the next big thing to make a stink on the Net, offering lucky users the chance to "Reach Out and Smell Someone," "Click and Sniff" and "Surf and Smell." Yes, this heaven "scent" technology is definitely the cheese: using fragrance push and ATML (Aroma Text Markup Language) you can "share smells in real time, over the Internet, with olfactory buddies all over the globe." Nobody nose better than the folks at RealAroma, who promise the release of SmellU SmellMe aroma conferencing software in the near future. You'll be "incensed" if you miss the developers' corner, which offers ATML tips and smell codes for apple blossom, bread baking, ballet slipper, b.o. (the moderate and NYC taxi varieties), lemon, pizza, sweaty headband and wet sheep, to name but a few."
Unfortunately, "realaroma.com" is now owned by someone selling fishing flies.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
H2S is extremely poisonous. So you could use the setup to kill a person anonymously.
And some will make a very stinky virus! That will be great! Stinky world! And why buy degusting wine if you can put those essential oils into water to get the taste? Fool!
******** "One day will came the StormHarvester..." ********
Why does it always have to be "Mais, oui," instead of just "Oui"? Doesn't "mais" mean "but" and "oui" mean "yes"?
now we get nose spam too.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
This is not news. This is the 5000th company to dump money into the empty pit that is scent reproduction on the computer.
Give it up people, even Digiscents was too late and too dumb.
In 2000 some company even wanted to put this type of tech into the gaming community. Wow, smell the singed flesh and the burning rubber!
Don't Crease the Weasel!
just ran across it the other night..
Trisenx.com
They make some kind of scent dome that uses refillable cartridges.. connects to the computer via serial...
looks like an expensive useless piece of crapola...
All the fragance companies had better copyright their scents!
While the French may say "Mais, oui!" to perfuming the air around the computer, the rest of the world says, "Take les shower!"
Anyone sufficiently interested in wine to fork out the money for such a thing would already know what raspberry or cassis or cedar smelled like. What sould the market for such a device be? It's especially odd to see this being touted in Burgundy, where what separates les hommes from les garçons are the hard to describe gravelly, leathery, spicy, earthy notes. Limited to simple smells, dialing up a Domaine de La Romanée Conti La Tâche would give you something pretty much indistinguishable from a run-of-the-mill Russian River Pinot Noir. I wonder if they'd plan to add a randomizing feature that would make 1% of the wines smell corked. Also I wonder if they would include cat piss to capture the aroma of the average Sauvignon Blanc.
Stephanie says / she wants to know / why she's given half her life to / people she hates now.
Scents and scent formulas aren't copyrightable, and are only rarely patentable. That's why knock-off perfumes are legal. So "warez glade" could be perfectly legal, though stinky.
I imagine that a low refresh rate will mean a very low rate of flow of (new) information.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
Just proves again that you shouldn't drink and read /. at the same time. Got a nasty purple stain on the MB and I think I killed the floppy drive too.
I call prior art!
50 year old prior art infact
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I can see some useful, if somewhat devious, uses for this type technology.
Smell is liked very closely with memeory and emotion and is a very effective marketing tool. Just look at Cinnabon. They are one of the biggest money makers in mall food courts because of one thing. Smell. Department stores for years have used smells in the ventilation systems to evoke certain emotions from people while shopping.
Imagine going to a cybercafe where the machines are provided by a marketing company. As you serf, small banners pop up. Not enought to be annoying, but they are there.
Now picture a Toyota ad poping up with the subtle scent of new car, not enough were you can pick it out, but enough that it triggers that excited feeling you get when you test drive or buy a new car.
I can see toy ads that would bring back parent's memoryies to childhood by using the smell of paste or Playdoh, even ads around the Christmas holiday with gingerbread smells.
Not just cybercafes, but info kiosks at the mall, or at your local train station or airport. It could even be triggered by using WiFi and reading your http requests. They could use it in conjuction with changing billboard or big-screen video ads in large, indoor areas.
Your local cable company provides a cheap rental of HDTVs courtisy of a marketing firm. Once a month or so, a package comes in the mail with a "smell cartridge" that you relpace in the TV. Commercials and tv events are used to trigger certain smells, again to evoke a certain emotion. Imagine a subtle smell of pizza everytime a Papa John's commercial comes on. Nothing overpowering, but very subtle. Just enough to make you hungry.
You wouldn't need a ton of smells, either. Just a cross section of 20 or so that seem to be a cross section of mainstream life.
Fortunately, it is preserved on the Internet Archive.
...
Don't forget, at the time 8 years ago there was a popular application for video conferencing called "SeeYouSeeMe"
RealAroma.com
burris
I've heard about this for a while but have not seen anyone finally fully develop it. It will be revolutionary for companies. I can see someone selling humidors that smell like cedar or a great cigar. It is a marketing dream, but that's probably all it is. I'll stay tuned.
The glass of wine I've got on my desk right now is just Two Buck Chuck cabernet, but it's good enough for an average dinner or for reading Slashdot in the evening. Some websites really need coffee instead.
And the author of the press release had probably cranked up the volume on /dev/marijuana a bit too recently before noticing he had an article deadline.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks