If the time comes when you conclude something smells on the Internet, you won't exactly be wrong, if DigiScents has something to say about it. And while founder Dexster Smith admits his company's technology has particularly pungent suggestions for the adult Internet world - "I get everyone and their twin brother saying what this could do with adult material," he snickered at Spring Internet World 2000 - he also insists DigiScents aims for more grand territories.
The hardware device needed to put the full scope of the DigiScents experience onto a computer and on the Internet won't launch for about another year. But Smith said that for now webmasters can obtain a software developers' kit, Snortal, launched at Internet World. "That allows Web developers, and game developers, to imbed the smells into their products."
How does the software work? Smith said it involves embedding scent objects into program codes, though game developers might require an hour with Web developers needing mere minutes. With Websites, he continued, "you can have it based on time, you can have it when someone clicks on the page, you have a lot of control over the Web development."
Smith said the idea hit himself and his partner, Joel Bellenson, as a somewhat logical outgrowth of their former lives as biotechnicians in Florida - they were co-founders of DoubleTwist, formerly Pangea Systems, Inc. "The beach, you know, is a serious sensory stimulation, both visual and smell," he said. "People are always going to smell the perfumes, the suntan lotions, the restaurants, the ocean. And we said, 'You know what, this is an incredibly powerful thing, it's a biochemical thing, and we can master this'."
In other words - their task was how to take what they knew biotechnically, biochemically, and apply it to the technical intimacies of the Internet world.
"If you can digitize smell, we should be able to reproduce smell," Smith said. "We see smell as another dimension of communications. Aroma Therapy is giant, and the applications running throughout the Net, the implications are huge, and [we] can imagine having an aroma therapy track set up that goes off a certain time of the day."
In fact, DigiScents imagines at least 23 aromatic applications, from BusinessScents for business sites, to scented e-mail, scented greeting cards, mixing softwares to make your own smells, other mixing softwares to apply "scentracks" to favorite films, videos, shows, music, and many more. DigiScents displayed test tubes of several of its working scents and the accuracy of their intended representations was striking - its chocolate chip cookie scent was simply too close to the real thing.
And the cost? For the software development kit, nothing - you can download it at www.digiscents.com/. And Smith and his people won't snort if you call it Smellivision in Cyberspace.
