Their software was customized to run on Macs and Unix boxes at major pharmaceutical companies. One of the packages, LifeSeq, was commissioned by Incyte to help it examine and compare genes in order to develop new drugs that could target specific diseases. LifeSeq was so far ahead of its competition that Incyte was able to resell copies to other companies for what Bellenson calls "a hefty subscription fee of a few million a year. Most genomics firms now use Pangea software.
This fall Pangea announced DoubleTwist. By , Bellenson and Smith had excused themselves from Pangea's day-to-day operations to focus on strategic planning. Both remain on Pangea's board. Meanwhile, they enjoyed the spoils of their success. Bellenson filled his 2,square-foot apartment with furniture from Africa, a grand piano, and Bowflex weight-training equipment.
Some might have expected the two to take time off. But not them. They founded their own venture catalyst company, Libra Digital, to jump-start new businesses, including Marc Canter's Broadband Mechanics. Then, on a brief vacation in Florida, they noticed hordes of women wearing exotic perfumes.
When Bellenson returned to California, he started investigating the role genes play in our ability to detect smells. He came across a recent experiment at Columbia University, which built on Harvard neurobiologist Linda Buck's breakthrough wherein she discovered the family of genes responsible for odor detection.
In , researchers in StuartFirestein's lab at Columbia engineered a virus to stimulate a rat's odor receptors, heightening its experience of smell and, theoretically, paving the way for the genetic "transplant" of receptors from one type of animal to another.
The explanation for this proved relatively simple. When odor molecules drift into the nose, each of them binds with a particular protein on the surface of a neuron. There are about 1, odor-matching proteins, each with a slightly different configuration, scattered across a human's 10 million odor-detecting neurons.
By comparison, a mouse has about 1 million neurons of this type, while a pig boasts million. When the shape of an odor molecule matches the shape of a protein, the molecules lock together, triggering the neuron, which sends a signal that the brain recognizes as a smell. DNA is relevant because its instructions - its genes - tell the body how to build the proteins that receive odor molecules and activate the neurons.
Bellenson started looking at promising gene sequences, then determined which proteins they would create. Here, he encountered a problem: No one knew the exact shape of these protein molecules; they were in a category that had never been modeled. Bellenson didn't want to spend the time and money on X-ray diffraction studies to create detailed models, so he searched for other proteins that might be similar - and found them in bacteria.
This wouldn't have been close enough for a pharmaceutical application, he notes. But it let him create a smell index. He wrote software algorithms to simulate the binding of odor molecules with proteins, then used trial and error to fine-tune the odors, testing them on an odor output device he'd designed.
Ultimately, just as a computer monitor can display millions of colors by mixing different proportions of red, green, and blue, Bellenson wants to generate billions of odors by blending different proportions of just to "scent primaries.
Initially, he wasn't thinking of building an odor synthesizer. He imagined applying his research to make foods and drinks smell and taste better. All other tastes are a function of the nose. That's why your sense of taste is degraded when you have nasal congestion. Also, it explains why elderly people don't taste things as well, because the ends of their chromosomes get chewed away.
Gradually, though, he developed a higher ambition - "to integrate scent with all media. Because Smith and Bellenson are software people, they don't want to manufacture the odor synthesizer themselves.
They plan instead to bulk-license iSmell to hardware companies. Also, anyone who wants to odor-enable a Web site will have to pay a licensing fee for the smell index, which reveals the correct proportion of iSmell scent primaries for a particular odor.
The big question, though, is whether consumers will want iSmell as much as they want MP3. The device works; I can attest to that. But there's something funny about putting a computer-controlled smell machine on your desktop. The biggest challenge now facing DigiScents may be to figure out how to overcome this "wacky factor. Bellenson is well aware that he must convince people to take this seriously.
The very notion of digital odor synthesis has been spoofed in several online hoaxes over the years. Then there was another Web site, sniff-and-cough, and an email message announcing WinSmell from Microsoft. Yet using odors for artistic expression hasn't always been dismissed as a joke; it's just been a while since the concept was explored in any depth.
Behind the Great Wall, a documentary employing the former, included 72 scent cues, ranging from nightclub smoke to Oriental spice, synced to scents pumped through the theater's ventilation system.
Smell-O-Vision was dispensed from under each theater seat. Two decades later, filmmaker John Waters famously used smell as a self-satirical gimmick in the Polyester. Waters presented his film in Odorama, distributing numbered scratch-and-sniff cards to audiences. Earlier mass entertainment applications of smell, introduced as a way to compete with the popularity of TV, offered an enhanced experience without asking anything extra of moviegoers; Odorama was more in the tradition of those headache-inducing, cardboard-and-acetate 3-D specs distributed at screenings of '50s horror movies like Creature From the Black Lagoon.
Transcending this kind of gimmick stigma seems intimidating, yet it has been done. At 3-D Imax theaters, audiences have shown they are willing to pay a premium to wear headgear fitted with liquid-crystal lenses synchronized via infrared signals with the movie projector, which runs at twice the normal frame rate. The right solution can make the difference:.
A lot of solutions I did see so far where just strangely looking prototypes. After trying the Olorama solution I was impressed. It simply did the job. After trying Olorama personally with a cinematic VR demo, I must say that it is a powerful experience enhancer… Fire, woods, waterfalls… Congratulations!
Or the smell of fireworks? Smell-O-Vision was our forerunner in our illusion of incorporating smell into films, and to definitely make it possible for us to smell during the screening of a film. Index What[…]. Something excites us and is our motivation to wake up every morning with more energy… How can we offer more sensory experiences?
VR Smell has certainly done a great job[…]. Spain Avenida Giorgeta 16 Olorama Technology Ltd. These cookies do not store any personal information. Functional functional. Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features. Analytics analytics. Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
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To begin with, there are considerable technical difficulties inherent in delivering smell. Unlike light and sound, it is transmitted as molecules, not waves—as mass rather than energy.
At the same time, the smells had to be lasting and powerful enough for a user to register and decode them. With the oPhone, this frequently resulted in a localized scent cloud, in which fragments of the message would get lost. The Cyrano avoids that problem entirely. Its goal is to fill the contained space of a car, and it shifts scent every eight minutes by default—the point at which the phenomenon known as olfactory fatigue normally sets in, rendering the original smell temporarily undetectable.
In the wild, smells come from different directions and in unpredictable combinations, accompanied by variations in heat and humidity. That single-note, unidirectional, dry-air experience results in something less visceral than true smell—the idea of coconut, rather than the oily, hairy fruit itself.
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