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I think the iSmell, at least the way it's described in the article, was a terrible idea. Whatever the scent-enabled equivalent of a Rickroll or a goatse link wo
by vandahm 8y ago
I think the iSmell, at least the way it's described in the article, was a terrible idea. Whatever the scent-enabled equivalent of a Rickroll or a goatse link would have been, we're better off without it.
That said, the technology seems kind of cool. The idea that we could define a set of primitive smells, then combine them into any other arbitrary smell is fascinating. If you have the binary data from an image file, and you know how to decode it, you can preserve a photograph forever -- potentially for thousands of years -- with no degradation. It would be really great to be able to preserve scents for posterity in the same way.
- Reason077 8y agoTheir first mistake was surely the name. "iSmell" ?! They would have done better to revive the Smell-o-vision or Aromarama brands.
- inopinatus 8y agoI would have been unable to resist naming it "Vaporware".
- inopinatus 8y agoWe went through this in the 80s with a similar outcome. The root cause of market failure then was consumers deterred by a format war between the compressed odour format, Nosepeg, and the higher fidelity (but patent-encumbered) WIF.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- artificial 8y agoWhat an amusing name, WIF.
- function_seven 8y agoThe bitter fight between those who pronounced it “whiff” and those (Deutsche) who said “veef” didn’t help the latter format.
- yosito 8y agoHow do you store the binary data for thousands of years with no degradation?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- vandahm 8y agoI don't know, but at that point we've left this problem domain and entered a new one: archiving digital data. That sounds like a daunting problem, but one that lots of people and institutions are strongly motivated to solve. If they were to come up with something, it would presumably work as well for digitally-encoded scents as it would for anything else.
- dghughes 8y agoLaser etched quartz or diamond. There was an article about it in the last few years but I cant find it. I'm pretty sure 10,000 years was the time mentioned. Found it. It's glass not quartz or diamond and it's supposedly stable for 13.8 billion years https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-d https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-d