Maker MY TV STINKS!
ambient scent marketing. In 2005, ScentAir,
a leading “scent delivery solutions” provider,
partnered with long-time elevator music
company Muzak — soon you’ll find yourself
wondering not only why you’re “Singin’ in the
Rain” but also why you smell like it!
O-Vision: “motion pictures with synchronized
odor emission.”
The idea of augmenting cinematic experiences with smells is nearly as old as cinema
itself. A mischievous projectionist is said to
have used an electric fan to disperse a rose
scent during newsreel footage of the Rose
Parade in 1906. Fifty years later, Smell-O-Vision and rival AromaRama battled to win
over the noses of American moviegoers, an
ultimately futile episode that inspired filmmaker John Waters to create his tongue-in-cheek Odorama scratch-and-sniff cards. These
were distributed at screenings of his 1981
comedy Polyester, where viewers were invited
to enhance selected scenes in the movie with
famously unpleasant scents, including glue,
grass, and feces.
The dawn of the internet age heralded the
arrival of digital scent technology. A 1999
Wired article profiled DigiScents, the company
behind the iSmell scent generator. The unfortunately named device’s creators envisioned
a fragrant future in which scent-emitting
hardware attached to computers and other
media devices would allow content creators
and advertisers to add an olfactory dimension
to the web. The company sank in 2001 when
the internet bubble burst, but the idea persists.
It resurfaced most recently in Japan as the
i-Aroma, a USB device that emits astrologically
appropriate aromatherapy.
Not all smell-related innovations have failed,
however. Scratch-and-sniff stickers remain as
popular today as they were 30 years ago, and
it’s hard to open a glossy fashion magazine
that doesn’t contain at least one perfume-drenched scent strip. If you’ve walked around a
supermarket recently, you’ve probably noticed
the growing number of air freshening products,
from low-tech spray odor maskers such as
Febreze to motion-sensing electronic devices
that dispense scent whenever you enter a
room.
Many hotels, casinos, and retailers have
adopted “logoscents,” smells intended to
enhance the emotional effect of their brands.
A whole industry has arisen around the idea of
Designing Smelltech
What distinguishes smell technologies that
succeed from those that fail is thoughtful
design — design that takes into account both
the science of smells and how people interact
with them. Before we consider what makes
smelltech compelling, let’s first consider how
smell differs from our other senses.
Take, for instance, the new iPhone, a prodigious piece of multisensory interactive technology. It has a high-resolution display that
delights our eyes with crisp text and sharp
images, sound output that floods our ears with
the full dynamic range of flawlessly reproduced
audio, and an interface that engages our sense
of touch in increasingly novel ways. It’s not
edible, so Apple’s engineers haven’t spent too
much time worrying about how it tastes. But
why have they entirely ignored our noses?
Try for a second to imagine how the message “See you tomorrow at 4” smells, and it
becomes clear that smell is not a particularly
effective method of communication. Smell
moves through the air slowly and unpredictably, and unlike sight, sound, and touch, it
can’t easily be turned on and off.
Because scents are invisible and diffuse,
it’s hard for people to agree on them in the
absence of visual stimuli. While you and I might
agree that the orange I’m holding in my hand
smells like an orange, if instead I were holding
a glass of green liquid that smelled the same,
we may no longer agree that orange is the predominant scent. Smell expert Avery Gilbert is
quick to point out that “wide person-to-person
variability is a hallmark of odor perception.”
In other words, smell is more subjective
than the other senses (it is responsible for
the majority of our sense of taste, which is
why tuna may taste horrible to one person
and like heaven to the next). This also means
38 Make: makezine.com/30
