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You've Got Smell!
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DigiScent is here. If this technology takes off, it's gonna launch the next Web revolution.
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By Charles Platt
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<font color="#000000" face="verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif" size="2">
Joel Lloyd Bellenson places
a little ceramic bowl in front of me and lifts its lid. "Before we begin,"
he says, "you need to clear your nasal palate."
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I peer into the bowl. "Coffee beans," explains Bellenson's partner, Dexster
Smith. "This is what they use in perfume stores. It's like the reset button."
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Dutifully, I reinitialize my nose by sniffing the beans. I'm preparing
for a sensory epiphany here, an epochal event in the history of art, smell,
and computation. Bellenson and Smith claim they've developed a highly secret
process to encode odors as digital data. Just as we can download digitized
music and play it through speakers attached to a computer, we should soon
be able to acquire online scent data that a little gadget can play back
as smells.
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<font color="#000000" face="verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif" size="2">
Bellenson, who sounds edgy and looks sleep-deprived, has been pitching
his new paradigm to me with the manic charisma of an infomercial host.
The way he sees it, "scentography" is going to transform the
entertainment-media spectrum, all the way from Web surfing to Hollywood movies.</font></p>
