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

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 

Sometimes when I walk by someone on the street, I hear a little snippet of their conversation. It’s a little vox-popping insight into that persons very persona. It can be anything from the classic “I’m stuck in traffic” (when stood outside the pub) or the the slightly more ambiguous “He put it where?!”.

I don’t mean to do this; I’m not some creepy eavesdropper of Londoners most intimate secrets. I can’t turn my ears off, although sometimes I wish I could as it makes me feel a bit naughty and audibly voyeuristic. 

I feel a bit like this about Twitter. It’s like digital eavesdropping but the person knows you are listening and secretly enjoys it. Pervs.

I think I’ve turned into a bit of a ratio perv of late. I find myself more intrigued by a persons twitter ratio (the gap between followers and following) than what that person is  actually saying. It’s a bit like watching a particularly beautiful lady walk down the train platform and counting how many chaps pretend not to look at her until she’s walked past. She could be the most interesting person in the world but they will never know.

I’ve also got a similar habit with smells. If someone (male or female) walks past me on the street and they smell incredible, I’l usually turn around to the person I’m with and exclaim, much to their dismay, “Did you smell that girl/guy? they smelt AWESOME!”. This often ends up in my acquaintance’s swift departure. I assume no one wants to hang out with that guy that goes around sniffing people.

If you think about it though, surely this is what the beautiful smelling person wants? Why else would you spend an obscene amount of money on smelling great if you didn’t want someone to appreciate it? It’s not my fault I breathed near them.

The reason I chat so much breeze about this is because we’ve recently been discussing connecting smell to the internet. It’s an intriguing area because the web is such a predominantly visual / auditory focused arena. We spend a great deal of time interacting with people on the web, yet it lacks the wealth of sensory stimuli that physical human - human contact provides in meatspace.

However, in many ways, I think the 140 character twitter message bears a close resemblance to the ephemeral passing waft of a particularly fragrant individual. They  both invoke certain emotions, have a certain charm or distaste and both disappear into the ether as quickly as they arrived.

This reminds me of something my old man once told me about the act of ‘snurdling’. Snurdling is the process of keeping a keen eye out for any young damsel who has recently de-mounted her bicycles seating area. Shortly after said bicycle is bereft of its owner, the snurdler in question shuffles over to the seat and gives it a quick sniff for any traces of human bodily odour.

Strange I know, but the prospect of a world where fleeting digital interactions leave behind a notable olfactory trace, sounds like a much more interesting and subtle means of notification than the various audio and visual cues I currently receive to tell me I have just interacted with another human being.

Bring on the digital snurdlers.

- Ben