Over the last month or so, we have been doing lots of experiments to work out exactly what the best medium is for dispersing smells on demand. At long last, it feels like we are very close to working it out, and have a working system that lets out smells whenever the internet tells it to. I thought it might be interesting to just outline and reflect on the strangely cyclical process we have gone through to get to where we are now.

Our first smelly prototype was the Pringles tube with a fan in the top and air freshener in the bottom. It definitely worked to an extent, and the fan did distribute the smell - the main problem being that it smelt quite strongly whether it was switched on or not. And its hard to smell the internet when everything else smells too.

The next one was the hacked Glade air freshener we called the “Smell of Success”. This used the same aerosol canister as a normal Glade freshener would use, and consequently had the same problems - although it could produce a strong smell with very little liquid, it smelt absolutely awful and was very expensive to replace when it ran out. Furthermore, there is very little possibility, with aerosols, for people to make their own scents and customize their device’s output.

The next would-be smell-maker was the ultrasonic vaporiser/fogger, some experiments with which can be found here. This worked by vibrating water at such a frequency that it turned into mist. If you put essential oils in said water, the air would very quickly fill with their scent. Despite producing a very visually stunning effect, the downside of the thick fog was that it began to soak everything around it in smelly water. Which isn’t ideal. Particularly around computers and stuff.

We needed to find a way of spreading the more natural, pleasant smells of essential oils without coating everything nearby in the aforementioned puddles of stench. And to do this, we have somewhat returned to where we started. By creating a closed system between an essential oil container and a directional fan, we make it possible to distribute the oils’ smell on demand, without it leaking out all of the time. It works!

Sometimes a very simple solution like this goes through a very complicated process to eventually arrive at it. With the components and system now more or less in place, work continues on how we refine the visual form of the object into something that works, but also that gives the smell dispenser a unique and desirable identity.

I assure you, you’re going to want one.

- Chris

As the development of our internet-of-smells device gathers pace, I thought it might be a good time to explain where we are currently are with everything.

The Smell of Success prototype was a one function device - it connected to your computer via USB and sprayed out a smell every time one of your tweets was re-tweeted. More than anything, it was the software that was determining this function, not the hardware. And software can be changed much more easily than hardware. What we had built, essentially, was an internet connected smell device, which, depending on the coding, could produce smells in reaction to all manner of web interactions.

We started to think of how we could use a more developed version of the device as a platform for others to experiment with their own personal uses for smelling the internet. Using an interaction similar to that employed by the brilliant ifttt.com, we can employ a simple cause and effect approach to choosing what it does - for example, if I get a retweet on twitter, then my device will produce the smell of lemon.

From this came the name “smellslike”, which poses the device as a mediator between internet interactions and smells in the real world. A retweet smellslike lemon. An e-mail smellslike chocolate. Whatever you like. And, we hope, as people play with this more and more, some really interesting interpretations will start to emerge.

- Chris

We’ve had a few requests from people asking to have a look at the code for Smell of Success or just generally being nosey about how we made it so we thought it would make sense to create an instructable!

So if you want to make your own and have a good old smelly narcissistic basking then this is the link for you:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Smell-of-Success/

But please share with us your finished creation - we’d love to see how you expand on our starting point! Fire an email over to foundry@mintdigital.com and show us what you have made.

-Tim

Following our live steam from last Thursday we though we would put together a quick video to show the Smell of Success in action in case you missed it. We made a polished fancy one but it was pretty boring so here’s a more rough and ready version. And just to mention, massive thanks to Shaun McWhinne for being a total champ, helping us getting our code put together and getting the twitter connection up and running on Processing.

Note: we are yet to test The Smell of Success emitting the aroma of leather bound book and rich mahogany - it’s currently fresh linen.

BONUS clip here for pyroheads - if you didn’t spot the puff of perfume in the above video you will in this one!

-Tim

Zoflora is “A powerful disinfectant with twice the germ-killing power of carbolic acid, but with beautiful fragrance oils extracted from flowers”.

Radical.

It has all the characteristics of a product that I should pledge my undying brand allegiance to – heritage, functionality, consistency, reasonable price, and British.

 And yet, I despise the stuff, it makes me do sick burps.

I feel kind of guilty about this. It’s really not Zoflora’s fault I have such a burning desire to set their bottling plant on fire… It’s the fault of those pesky emotions again, strutting around my frontal lobes like they own the place.

This is because when my first dog died, my mum cleaned her body (the dog’s, not my mum’s) with Zoflora to keep germs and bacteria away.

Completely unbeknown to me, the nerve endings in my nose were secretly and ‘illogically’ collaborating with my brain to create negative emotions towards the Zoflora fragrance, based on the negative emotional experience I was having at the time.

Sensuously negative experiences create olfactory ghouls for later on in life. Every time I get a whiff of Zoflora now, I’m immediately reminded of my dog’s death. I am a brand manager’s worst nightmare.

On a happier note, sensuously positive emotional experiences can create olfactory angels on your shoulder. I have a particular fondness for the smell of damp for example, because of many happy memories of falling asleep on a damp garden swing in the summer heat.

It seems lots of people far more qualified than I have been researching this stuff too.  This lady has got some fascinating things to say about the subject, and she’s got something to do with Oxford which means it must be interesting, right?

A fascinating experiment she mentions is the ‘Winterfresh’ experiment. Basically, American people in the 60’s thought the ‘Winterfresh’ scent was totally awesome, but the English people involved in the experiment thought it were simply horrid. Why was this? Well, turns out that America used the scent to flavor candies, whereas the English used it to flavor wartime medicinal drugs…

So when scientists asked what they thought of the smell, Americans immediately associated it with the happy go lucky days of their pre-obese youth, whereas the English, in a suitably pessimistic stance, likened it to war, death, and painful doctors appointments. Lovely.

This strikes me as a rich and valuable area to be playing around with. However, It’s hard to produce something with smell and the internet that doesn’t seem novel and bordering on ridiculous (Consider the passing fads of older forms of media, scratch and sniff in print, smell-o-vision in television etc). I think this is why it seems attractive. Although smell is an extremely powerful, emotional and evocative sense, it’s still extremely chaotic, random and subjective.

Audio and visual culture tends to have a meticulously constructed language. A set of codes and conventions that enable clear communication to a mass of people. This doesn’t exist for smell, so the connotations and semantics of it as a more formalised tool for communication are still up in the air (Excuse the pun).

  With the ‘smell of success’ we started to ascociate the feeling of personal satisfaction (getting a re-tweet) with Glade’s fresh linen fragrance. Imagine this on a larger scale, where certain scents can provide ubiquitously understood ambient information – what does a wifi bubble smell like? How can smells purposefully aid your memory, warn you of danger and influence your mood?

Hello Internet of smells.

Live video for mobile from Ustream

Presenting our latest prototype -  The Smell of Success!

To briefly sum it up, the Smell of Success is a hacked Glade air freshener which is hooked up to Twitter via Arduino. Whenever someone re-tweets the latest tweet from the @mintfoundry account, it sprays a single shot of scent into the room.

We will be streaming it in action from 3.30-5.00pm (BST) - just retweet our last tweet to see it puff out a small wisp of smelly goodness a few moments later.

We’re sorry you won’t be able to smell it where you are.

Rest assured, we will.

As you may have read last week, recently we have been considering the possibilities of connecting smell to the internet. Alongside conceptual exploration of the potential of smell, how it affects us, and how we can use it online, we have been building a simple prototype that will emit a scent in response to an online activity.

Titled ‘The Smell of Success’, the prototype is a hacked Glade air freshener that sprays out its “vanillaroma” whenever one of your tweets is re-tweeted. It came from us playing around with the idea of rewarding digital success with physical rewards - giving you a little pat on the back or treat whenever someone responds favourably to something you do on the web.

So it works like this. The Glade is hooked up (via arduino and processing) to our Twitter account. We put out a tweet of some sort. The device can then recognise whenever someone re-tweets it, and every time that happens, it will let out a little puff of scented air. So you should most certainly re-tweet @mintfoundry whenever you can, and stink out the Mint Digital offices for us.

As Ben pointed out in his wonderful “Digital Snurdling” post, the ephemeral nature of a passing smell has great similarity with the way a tweet works - it exists momentarily before wafting away and being forgotten. Of course, those who have enough Twitter clout to be re-tweeted all the time would have their little machine constantly pumping out the smell of success (which, admittedly, probably isnt vanillaroma).

This coming week, we will be working towards how we can make this prototype something more developed - exploring the possibilities of connecting it to different people and networks, and also working on its physical and aesthetic properties. In its current guise, it does of course have the potential to seem gimmicky; its our aim to resolve this and make use of the capacity of smell to genuinely enrich digital experiences.

Stay tuned and keep up the re-tweeting. Smell you later.

- Chris