The Hindu : E-mail with aroma

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Feb 25, 2004

Business

Business

E-mail with aroma

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE, FEB. 24. Has the Internet come to its senses at last — the sense of smell, to be exact? A U.K.-based Net services provider is offering customers an add-on service — albeit a pricey one — where one can receive up to 2000 different aromas via email.

Telewest Broadband has just tied up with, Trisenx, the U.S.-based company that has developed the "Scent Dome'' a tea pot-shaped device that can be plugged into the serial port of a personal computer, like a printer. Inside, are some 20 odour-emitting cartridges that be combined to form 60 primary aromas and customised as 2,000 different fragrances. The accompanying "Senxware'' (for "Sensory Enhanced Net eXperience'') software allows the user to `mix-and-match' a variety of olfactory experiences, as well as sending and receiving them by email — or even creating a `smelly' website.

The web resource www. howstuffworks.com suggests that to send such smells as email, each scent is coded and its combination of the primary odours is digitised into a small file and embedded in the mail.

The recipient triggers this file, which then activates the aroma bank attached to his or her PC and releases the exact combination that was sent.

Three years ago, another U.S.-based company called DigiScent, released similar technology with a lot of fanfare, but soon went out of business; so this week's British offering is in fact the Internet's second coming — smell-wise.

The Trisenx website offers the Senx Scent Dome for $269 and the refill cartridges cost $48 each.

That might seem like a lot of money for a whiff or two of fragrance — but the real market seems to be promotional: Supermarkets can let loose a variety of fragrances to announce new scents and cosmetics and can entice customers into restaurants with the whiff of coffee — by programming a PC.

In an earlier era, the Cinema briefly toyed with a technology called "Aroma-rama'' or Smell-o-Rama'': Customers were provided a special card with their tickets and a subtitle popped up on screen occasionally, inviting them to scratch different numbered portions of the card, as the film unfolded. A scene set in a rose garden could then be enhanced by releasing the appropriate smell.

The first film to exploit this technology was the 1966 Steve McQueen starrer, "The Sand Pebbles,'' advertised in some theatres (not in India) with the catchline "All the cinammon and stink of the East.'' Viewers showed little taste for such "stinking'' realism'' — and the experiment was not repeated.

It remains to be seen how a new Internet-savvy public will react to the latest olfactory assault.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Business