This Revolutionary Tech Ended For the Worst Reason

This article features interview segments with Joel Bellenson, which are shown as indented text 🙂

This video may seem to be about light hearted tech, but actually, it’s one of the most interesting and tragic tech stories that is now being told, in it’s entirety for the very first time. The late 1900s were all about innovation. Bringing new experiences that had previously not been possible, and one of them used a sense, that even with today’s tech is mostly wasted, and that’s our sense of smell…

Smell’o’vision was an attempt to add another dimension to our sensory entertainment, a bit like a crap 4D cinema. You could get smell’o’vision collectable Simpson’s cards. You could get smell’o’vision collectible packs in cereal, but for us in the UK, it was 1995’s BBC Children in Need that awoke our senses.

Children in Need is a big campaign that the BBC runs every 2 years to raise money for… well.. Children in Need. It’s a night of fundraising TV entertainment fronted by a massive yellow bear, and in 1995 that meant, us buying one of these little booklets for £1, and letting Noel Edmunds kick off a night of stench. That might sound horrific, and indeed, it was, but it was also pretty fun. There were several TV shows taking part over several days, where you could scratch one of these boxes at the appropriate time, and smell whatever was on TV at the time.

Let’s try smelling Noel Edmunds and see what we get… Oh! It’s like. It’s like Old Spice or Brut! It’s actually quite nice.

But once you’d done it, the novelty kinda wore off, and you were unlikely to want to experience it again.

But that didn’t stop a bunch of maverick entrepreneurs riding on the excitement of PCs and the internet. Apparently, the dawn of the millennium was when several companies felt the time and technology were ripe, to offer up pungent aromas via your computer, allowing you to sniff your way through the likes of Duke Nukem’, Tomb Raider and Leisure Suit Larry. Sounds great, right? But it didn’t really go as they had planned.

The History of Smell-O-Vision

Of course, this concept was nothing new. People had been injecting scents into theatres for over 100 years. In 1868 a Rimmel scent was sprayed into the Alhambra Theatre of Variety during the Magic Dance of The Fairy Acorn tree. In 1916, the Rivoli Theatre in New York would pump scents into the air for the film, Story of Flowers, and in 1933, Paramount’s Rialto Theatre was rigged with a system to deliver various odours during films.¹

But these were all attempts to increase footfall in particular venues. It was never intended to be integral to film’s essence.

Various attempts were made to sell the idea as a more integrated part of film, including “Scentovision” demonstrated at New York’s 1939 World Fair, and General Electric’s Smell-O-Rama in 1953, which was demonstrated with a 3D rose image, giving off various floral scents.

But it wasn’t until the Charles H. Weiss company created AromaRama, where filming was created alongside a fragrance process and then pumped into the cinema through the air conditioning system that the hype really took off. Charles Weiss would comment “Our audiences will be able tos mell the scenes. Among these are odours of grass, earth, exploding firecrackers, a river, incense, burning torches, horses, restaurants and the scent of a trapped tiger”.

However, it had competition from the earlier Scentovision, that had now returned as Smell-O-Vision, created by Michael Todd and Hans Lube.²

However, both of these systems had problems, ranging from lingering and synthetic odours, distracting noises created by pushing odours into the room, and even people sniffing too loudly, keen to catch a whiff due to inconsistent coverage across the four corners of the room.

As a homage to earlier attempts, American film director John Waters would launch the film Polyester in 1981 with scratch and sniff cards that revellers could use throughout, as long as they could see. A trick that was repeated with various films, and of course 1995’s BBC Children in Need.

Back to DigiScents…

So, it was only a matter of time before this concept was applied to gaming. Especially with 90s gamers on the constant hunt for the next, absolutely bizarre peripheral to enhance their gaming experience, or detract from it, depending on the piece of tat that you bought.

It was the winter of 1998, when Joel Bellenson and Dexster Smith, both Stanford graduates, were on holiday in South Beach Florida and dreamt up the concept.

Sitting around on the beach, Bellenson recounted how “There were all these hot ladies, nice beaches, good vibes and the smells were just hitting me… I took a deep breath and said, ‘Man, is there some way I can capture this and give all the other loser geeks on the internet a taste of the outside world?'”

Having previously launched a successful gene sequencing software company called Pangea Systems, Bellenson, a molecular biologist, and Smith, an industrial engineer, had the know-how, they thought, to put it to the test.

They also had the initial finance, having already founded their own venture catalyst company, Libra Digital, which had helped the likes of Marc Canter’s Broadband Mechanics. Canter having previously founded Macromedia.

Upon returning from Florida to their base in California, Bellenson started investigating the role genes play in detecting smells, finding an experiment where neurobiologist Linda Buck engineered a virus to stimulate odour receptors. She discovered that when odour molecules drift into the nose, each of them binds with a particular protein on the surface of a neuron. There are approximately 1,000 odour matching proteins across a human’s 10 million odour detecting neurons. When the shape of an odour molecule matches the shape of a protein, they lock together, triggering the neuron, and sending a signal to the brain, which recognises the smell. The problem was, no one knew the exact shape of the various proteins, so he searched for other proteins that may be similar, finding them in bacteria. This allowed him to create a “smell index”, writing software algorithms to simulate the binding of odour molecules with proteins, and using trial and error to fine tune the output fragrances.

I caught up with Joel, who’s now living in Uganda, to get some further background on how this came to be;

Kitted out with a T-Shirt bearing the brand logo, Joel dived into his background first.

I came out of Stanford. Well, first, Harvard in chemistry, Stanford, Biochem and international relations. And I had come out of a Nobel Prize-winning lab; Paul Berg, who had invented recombinant DNA, cutting and pasting. I ended up getting involved with pioneering DNA writing and reading, synthesis and sequencing. My friend’s girlfriend had found those genes in rodents. Linda Buck, she won the Nobel Prize. I leveraged her data and found the homologues in Macaque monkeys first and then humans. Then we made three-dimensional models of the receptors Then we modelled how fragrance molecules would stimulate those receptors. That was how we indexed fragrances, since they’re a collection of chemicals of different ratios that each interact with all the different receptors to varying degrees, and that became a way for indexing.

Using the likes of Smell-O-Vision for inspiration, Bellenson’s idea then, was to generate thousands of odours, just by blending them with different proportions of 64 primary scents. Using this, the recipes could be encoded in files, and the chemical components, held in printer like cartridges, could be combined and transmitted through a USB powered desktop device, wafting them into the user’s face on demand.³

After enticing various executives from Sega, NEC, Sprint, TransAmerica and Bath & Body Works, offering knowledge of both tech and the world of fragrances, they formed Digitscents in February 1999 and got to work on developing their product.

A product that was both software and hardware in form, although Digiscents really wanted to concentrate on the software, with their main intention of developing a fully fragranced internet superhighway. Their idea was to develop this “smell-index”⁴ they could licence to websites and software developers, whilst outsourcing the hardware manufacture to other companies. This would, for example, allow you to test perfumes online, get a whiff of Banoffee pie from a food retailer, send a virtual bouquet of flowers, or even get a whiff of a fully interactive online world. The fact that smell bypasses the conscious brain and communicates directly with the limbic system, meant it could evoke emotions that were literally uncontrollable – a powerful tool to whoever wields it. It’s why malls pipe food smells into the shops surrounding food courts.

The team weren’t stupid, they knew where the money lie if this thing was successful, but they also knew it would be an uphill struggle to market successfully, and without ridicule. Bellenson himself was quoted as saying “there’s something funny about putting a computer controlled smell machine on your desktop.”, which there very much is. Indeed, even the idea of your computer creating smells had already been spoofed online. The website Realaroma.com had conceived of the RAHTML concept (Real Aroma Text Markup Language), and even jested about a 3-vile contraption that essentially was supposed to do the exact same thing that Digiscents were working on. They even had their own “smell-index” using hex codes akin to selecting colours for a webpage.⁵

So to combat this, they needed to first develop a vision. A credible vision. Which meant they needed to deliver working examples and they needed to deliver the means for this to work. But first order of the day, was to create a prototype, and by that I mean something for people to look at in magazines, so they didn’t think the whole thing was a joke… After all, nothing says, we’re serious more than a Star Trek style yacht to stick on your desk. Especially a Star Trek style yacht to stick on your desk that was called iSmell. Yup, Apple would be proud.

Armed with this, and a range of scents, Digitscents went about creating a hype train the world had never seen, nor smelt, and the media absolutely lapped it up. From the general media to gaming publications like the Official Sega Dreamcast Magazine, who were concerned that people would start sending stinkbombs via email, it seeped into every crevice it could find.

The Wired Interview

In fact, it generated so much publicity that Wired magazine even created a scratch and sniff front cover for the occasion on their November 1999 issue, with the words Smell the Future, over an armpit drawn by Spumco.com, which is well worth checking out on internet archive, if you’re not already familiar.

Yup! It still smells!

The article featured a detailed interview with Bellenson, Smith and indeed, Marc Canter, who was keen to use the technology across the internet, synchronised with movies, videos and music.

Charles Platt, the interviewer writes;

“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.”

“We’re sitting in Bellenson’s immaculately renovated 1920s apartment in Oakland, California, overlooking a grand panorama of downtown and Lake Merritt. But no one’s checking out the view. We move closer to an IBMThinkPad that rests on an ornate glass-topped table. Smith rolls the trackpoint, shifting the cursor arrow to a picture of some green grapes. He clicks on them.”

“Beside the ThinkPad, linked via serial cable, sits a black plastic box 3 inches tall, 2 inches wide, and 5 inches deep, about the size of an electric pencil sharpener. Somewhere inside it a little fan starts whirring, drawing in air at the back and blowing it over tiny vials of oils that are being heated selectively in response to signals from the computer. The air picks up the oily fragrance and wafts it out through a 2-inch vent.”

“I straighten up and give Bellenson and Smith an apologetic look. “Uh, it smells like cheap perfume.”

Smith scrolls to a picture of oranges. He clicks on them.

Once more I breathe deeply – “Orange peel,” I report. My hosts relax in their chairs, looking immensely relieved.

Canter initiates a sequence of movie clips, and in a window on the screen we’re transported to Oz. Dorothy, the Lion, and the Scarecrow are venturing into the forest, and its trees are not merely visible but sniffable. “Ahhhh!” Canter exclaims. “Smell that cedar!” And – it’s true! A cedar fragrance emerges from the little black box beside the computer.

Now the Wicked Witch is mixing a poison potion over a crackling fire. “Oh, that wood smoke!” Canter cries with delight. Indeed, the box emits a smoky tang – without the smoke.”

So, it actually worked!

By the end of 1999, Digiscents, did, at least, have a mystery black box, that looked nothing like their prototype, but did in fact emit smells. In that session, 26 scents were tested, including Donkey Kong’s bananas, With Platt commenting that the smells cleared pretty quickly, allowing for new fragrances to be delivered in fairly rapid succession.

Canter, who was working alongside the team at that point notes “Luckily, we have a world-class sensory psychologist on staff, who’ll be able to work out exactly the median time frame that is appropriate for refreshing the nostrils”

I asked Joel for more details on how this worked;

Basically, 64 basic primaries, and they had a 10X range. We wish we could have done a bigger range. I just figured if we could at least get to market, even with the Atari, we’ll eventually get to the more sophisticated. From that, the common intorex is probably countless, but certainly it can make thousands of recognizably different fragrances. I can’t say it was perfect. I can’t say we were able to elegantly differentiate between all kinds of different high-end fragrances I would say it was more cartoonish than elegant, but still good enough to set the vibe.

The 64 primaries Joel mentions are the base chemicals which can be combined to produce thousands of fragrances. He showed me how this would work with the industrial design version 2.0 which was ready before the start of the millennium.⁶

This is the industrial design of what it was going to look like. The goal was to jam then the functional one into this form factor. Being this blue cartridge, each one of these ridges was a different element. Activates via piezoelectric like an inkjet printer.

The top of the cartridge had piezoelectric heads. Electric heads attached to a circuit board, and then the blower in the top would suck it up and mix them and blow towards you.

It would call forth the appropriate elements of the cartridge in the right ratios to be able to reproduce the thousands of smells that our cartridge could do.

Above all, it’s clear that Digitscents meant business, and they intended to be taken seriously.

The Hype Train

In early 2000, Victor Lucas would cover this emerging technology in an episode of Electric Playground, with Joel on hand to demonstrate some of the scents. You can even see a copy of that Wired magazine in the foreground. Now, clearly, there was no prototype on hand today. Instead Joel just had a collection of fragranced sticks for folks to inhale. Unfortunately, if they wanted to make an impact, they would have to do more than that, and not just promises of a device by the end of the year.⁷

That’s in part because by this point, they also had three rivals. Remember, this was still the dotcom boom, and if there was an idea, you’d be sure people would jump on it like flies to a shitfest.

The first of those was AromaJet, a Dallas company that was focussing on fragrancing video games, albeit with a rather strange device worn around the neck.

Then were was a company from Georgia, TriSenx⁸, who were promising to ship a simpler implementation that relied on water based chemicals to “keep it simple”. With an example given by the company’s founder, Ellwood Ivey Jr. that it could simulate the odour of a brand new car, but it couldn’t simulate the precise aroma of a 2000 Nissan Altima. This product printed the scent, and interestingly, also the taste onto paper, which could then be sniffed – or licked – at leisure, and apparently was due for release in the last week of April, having received a whopping 50 orders to that point.

Finally, there was an Israeli company, SenSelt⁹, which was just starting to get off the ground.

But it was Digiscents leading the way, and as the year progressed, things started to look even more interesting.

In May 2000, it was announced that Digiscents would be partnering with eCandy.com to provide visitors with a total shopping experience, including the sweet smells of the online merchandise. With Rani Ali-ahmed, co-founder of eCandy.com stating “Imagine yourself walking into a candy store, the first thing you notice is the smell”.

Later that month Proctor & Gamble then announced a research & distribution alliance with DigiScents, giving access to P&G’s research methods so it can gauge consumer reaction to adding smell of a production or the effect of including scent with a movie, game or e-mail.

We had relationships with Kraft Foods, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever. Procter & Gamble was going to distribute the device. One of their demands was that we We do all the ruggedization testing, which turned out to be very expensive because all those chemicals, they cross-react with plastic, and it’s really a combinatoric problem. We got through it.

By this point, over 2000 game developers alone had also downloaded the DigiScents Software Development Kit, allowing them to integrate the technology with their latest games¹⁰.

We had partnerships with Microsoft for the Xbox and Sony for PlayStation 2. What did we do? Like Lara Croft, when your animals were sometimes stalking her and you could smell them.

RealNetworks also jumped onboard, allowing their RealPlayer software being rigged up to dish out free fragrances on demand, and even synchronise with media.

It was so exciting to see anything, movies, video games, commercials with with scent. We added scent tracks to movies like Saving Private Ryan. Soldiers are walking through the tall wild fields. You’re smelling the grass, and then you start smelling something nasty, what turned out to be the smell of a dead body.

By the middle of 2000, it really looked like this was going to be a thing, alongside all the other interactive peripherals that were becoming hot news. Anyone remember the Force Feedback mouse?

Working, polished prototypes developed by GeneMachines were appearing at trade shows and the general public were queueing up to get a literal whiff of the action.¹¹

Digiscents were even hoping their competition would ramp up. They envisaged an ecosystem of speaker sized products they dubbed as Reekers, that could have smell index licenced to run on them and synthesize with competitor products as well.

Yahoo Internet life even published a special feature on the new ways to interact with the web. Smell, Touch and Taste. As you can imagine, sex was a driving force here. Something that Bellenson mentioned in our interview;

The adult industry was all over it, too, by the way. From literal body odors to some of the performers have names that sound like candy and fruit. It was fun. We were unleashing this whole new thing. It was like giving Jimi Hendrix an electric guitar.

With talk of sweat smells and pheromones being pumped out of the humble little iSmell box, things were really hotting up.

Promises were made that the iSmell would be ready by early 2001, with a price tag of under $200, and scent cartridges posited to be available for under $50. Each cartridge expected to last a few months. Which could turn out to be quite an expensive gimmick, especially with special cartridges for different experiences.

If you wanted to get finetuned, you could have specific cartridges for different application. Then you could have, you wanted to just do a first-person shooter, well, you’re going to need a hell of a lot more gunpowder like that. Or if you’re going to do a racing game, you’re going to need a lot more of racing-related smell.

Of course, unless knock off carts also appeared, like with inkjet ink. But the DotCom bubble was starting to burst and DigiScents knew they needed more money.

So we survived the dotcom crash, actually. We raised a significant amount from two of the fragrance and flavor chemical companies, Quest and Givaudan. They put in 5 million each. We decided to do strategic tie-ups with the chemical makers, and that kept us going after the crash.

The Crash

Still, by April 2001 there were problems. The Toronto Star ran a headline “Investors smell a rat at DigiScents”. It seemed, to the media at least, that investors were starting to question whether sniffing your computer was the way forward.¹²

The reality was a little different. Although most of their initial funding was gone. On paper, things still looked good. They had secured deals with 5,000 websites, software and video game developers. The SDK had been downloaded over 5,000 times alone, and interest was strong.

And Sony had told us their experience. Every time they launched a new category of consumer electronics device, they said, look, it costs 100 million no matter what. You guys haven’t raised nearly enough. We had raised 25 million to date. This year, you’re going to need at least another 100 million. You should put this device in a million people’s households for free. And so we’re, all right, we need to do much bigger financing than we had planned. We went out and we did it, and we lined it up.

Goldman Sachs was leading, and Givaudan, who had already invested, was going to be the follow-on. Unilever was going to come in, and each of the major players was going to put up 50 million. In order to get it done, we had to get through our due diligence with Givaudan. Now, they wanted to go through a much more serious due diligence process than through the initial investment they had made, which is what eventually bit us in the ass. The CEO at the time was facing a challenge from the CFO who basically said, Hey, when we spun out of Hoffman Laroche, this was the very first investment that was made, was into DigiScents. It’s amazing. Everything went great in this due diligence, but that was a big risk we took. It might not have gone well. We should have done this first bad protocol. And so the CEO was humiliated. And so he dropped out, which killed us

In a 2001 interview Joel commented “We don’t fit very easily into what people are funding… “We’re basically trying to position ourselves for a re-launch”, with mention that iSmell could even be used in cars or for medical aromatherapy purposes, but around them, companies were dropping like flies, and investors were still nervous.

Despite this, they did manage to secure more funding, at least, they would have if it hadn’t been for other world events;

That summer, we were trying to get it restarted because we had run out of cash. We were going to have to do a new financing on harsh terms. That was okay. Anything to survive, right? Morgan Stanley had someone who was a super big fan, and he was determined to recapitalize us. We were flying back and forth to New York from the Bay Area, and they never quite had the right people in the room. Now, here’s the wild thing. My business partner’s family was going through some real difficulties. I wanted to help him out. He and I have been best friends for a long time. I cancelled all of our meetings, and we went down to Florida to help his family. It culminated on the same day as 9/11. A couple of months later, I was like, You know what? Weren’t we supposed to be meeting with Morgan Stanley? Let me check our calendar. We had two tentative dates set, one, and both at 9: 00 AM, both on the 50th floor of the World Trade Center, one on September 10th, one on September 11th.

The irony is had we gone on the 10th, we would most certainly have died because we always were trying to save money and not waste money at hotels. So we would have flown back from Newark to San Francisco. And that was the flight that the passengers crashed in Pennsylvania. Had we done it on September 11th, we would have been there when the plane hit the building on the floor, pretty much that it hit. But not that many people got killed on that floor. As it turned out, some of our bankers did. So that was traumatizing for our champion who was pushing for the recap since several of his buddies had died. Everything was just up in the air after that. So 9/11 was really what put the final kibosh on us. And so Maybe this is a sign. Dexter and I are running a full blast since the late ’80s. And we just said, you know what? Maybe it’s time to take a break.

By the end of the year, the company was disbanded¹³, and the stink dream was no more.

I asked Joel what he might have done differently, and whether that may have helped the company;

If I had to do anything differently, I would have gone with a simpler device and not tried to be as ambitious. That would be our main critique. But nonetheless, even though we were aiming too high, it was coming together.

Just like Digiscents, the other products also failed to come to any sort of fruition. The demand, and the money simply wasn’t there, although Aroma Jet is still listed on the MicroFab Technologies website. Although TriSenx did eventually test launch their Scent Dome, which was tested by ISP Telewest in 2004¹⁴. The dome could create around 60 different smells and used codes embedded in an email or web page to produce them. The device had no way to waft scents towards the user, and it never really got past the testing stage.

Since then, various companies have tried to do the same, including integrations with VR¹⁵, which arguably would be pretty neat¹⁶¹⁷

And in fact, Sony, just this year announced conceptual technology to allow gamers to smell their games.

“Sony is introducing smell-o-vision at the Consumer Electronics Show at Vegas this week. The goal is to make gaming as immersive to players as possible…”

It seems then, that this is something that just isn’t going away.

Which is a blessing, and a curse. A blessing because it would be incredibly cool in some titles. Imagine it allowing to tell if an Alien was near in Alien Isolation, or having to mask odours in Hitman to prevent detection. But it could be a curse. Can you imagine it being built into your phone and serving adverts.

You’d be sitting there at the bus stop and suddenly get a whiff of Mark Zuckerbergs beard as an unwelcome advert seeped out of your pocket. I, for one am grateful that it didn’t get that far, however, it could have been cool, and regardless, the technology behind Digiscents didn’t go to waste.

We started another company. We used some of what we had learned with DigiScents on chemical informatics, and we used AI and designed new drugs against malaria and African sleeping sickness. That took me to where I’m speaking to you from in Uganda. Why Uganda? Well, the chief engineer engineer of Double Twist was a Uganda. When I discovered these drugs, he hooked me up with the Ministry of Health here. The head of the World Bank for East Africa bumped into me, recognized me from the news, and gave my name to the Prime Minister, and they appointed me an advisor to the President of Uganda for life science and agribusiness. It came back and forth, and then he said ‘Hey, why are you wasting your life in North America? They’ve done everything they need to do. We have lots of unsolved problems. We need someone to come here and think outside of the box. Look, you’re not married, you don’t have kids. Come here’, so I moved here full-time in 2012. And I’ve subsequently used that same methodology for my current company that I have a partner with in Belgium, Ajinomatrix, where we have digitized the sense of taste. And we work with food and beverage companies in Europe and Asia, helping them to reformulate their product to accommodate different dietary niches, either for health reasons or ethical reasons.

Sometimes you have to let go of something for it to actually become useful.

Until next time, I’ve been Nostalgia Nerd.

Toodleoo.

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17. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_scent_technology [↩]