iSmell
~ the last words ~
iSmell never shipped, so there is nothing to have used. That is the honest starting point. In 2001 i was a teenager in turkey on a 56k modem, and the idea that a device on my desk would puff a smell at me when a page loaded belonged to a magazine i could not buy, in a market i was nowhere near. iSmell was american vaporware at its most confident.
DigiScents was founded in early 1999 and raised around twenty million dollars to build it. The plan was a USB peripheral shaped like a shark fin, loaded with a cartridge of 128 primary odors that software could mix on demand into thousands of smells. Websites and emails would carry a scent code, the way they carry a color, and your desk would fill with coffee or cut grass, whatever the page decided. In october 1999 Wired put the still-unreleased device on a scratch-and-sniff cover, which is about as close to a product as it ever got.
The money ran out in late 2001. There was no launch and no recall, because there were no users. iSmell exists now only as a fixture on worst-inventions lists, a clean case of the dot-com habit of funding the demo and forgetting the product. From turkey it was not even a rumor. It was a thing i read about years later, already dead, already a joke.
~ the record ~
| Born | 1999, unveiled on a scratch-and-sniff Wired cover |
|---|---|
| Peak | a prototype, never sold to the public |
| Killed | late 2001, out of funding |
| Lifespan | about two years as vapor |
| Made by | DigiScents Inc. |
| Killed by | no product and no money left |
~ what it was supposed to be ~
The pitch was genuinely ambitious. Smell is the sense tied hardest to memory, and DigiScents wanted to digitize it the way sound and image had already been digitized. Sony and Microsoft were reportedly interested for games, and film companies liked the idea for theaters. On paper the reach was enormous. On a desk it was a plastic fin that never got there.
~ why it stayed vapor ~
The problems were the boring physical ones. Real smells do not decompose into 128 sliders. A room never clears its air between page loads, and nobody had a reason to author scent for a web that could barely load images. DigiScents solved the funding and the press before it solved any of that, and the funding was the part that ran out first.
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other gadgets: Multiflow Computer, Microsoft Surface Duo, Sony Ericsson, Danger, Inc.
also died in the 2000s: モバプリパ, STAR-BEACH, magnet
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