The Reinvented Blog

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about digital smell. I’ve been so sucked into the digital world over the last couple of years that it took me a while to realize that it only covered two senses – audio and video. Where are the digital mechanisms for the other three senses – digital smell, digital taste, and digital touch?

It’s hard to envision the encoding and delivery mechanisms for digital smell, but not difficult to imagine what one could do with it (hey, who wouldn’t be thin if you could make brussel sprouts smell like chocolate and vice versa?)

There are current uses of smell to market products that could be amazing, and amazingly manipulative, if digital smell technology were available. The New York Times has a great article on scent marketing and “brandscents.”

And Smell-o-Vision is making a small comeback, even without a good way of delivering the smells. But media experts like Robert Thompson (director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University) are doubtful about whether smell adds a new dimension to movies: “I think it’s forever going to be a novelty….It’s just not necessary, and there aren’t very many movies that would make us even care about smell.” I disagree with him – I think we will eventually experience the power of full five-sense (or is it six-sense?) media experiences, and they will make current media seem extremely limited by comparison.

Recently I was talking to my sister about digital smell and she started talking about Lucretius and his problem of how you see rounded corners through the ether when the shape is actually a rectangle, or something like that – well, she’s a philosophy professor and this is the way she thinks and she makes it sound interesting even when I don’t fully understand it. I haven’t thought about Lucretius since I took my Philosophy 101 final many years ago, but I can see that there is a connection – it was a fundamental concern of the ancient philosophers to think about what is reality and how we perceive reality and what we can know about what we see, and it still is a fundamental concern today – even if it is often in more mundane terms like figuring out if a photo has been Photoshopped beyond all recognition of what it once represented.

As our perceptions of reality get more and more complicated as they are increasingly manipulated with digital mutations, I wonder if we may be tempted to care less about what is actually real and care more about what is really cool to experience. Digital smell would be an awesome experience.