This Tech Ended For the Worst Reason | Nostalgia Nerd

this video might seem to be about light-hearted tech but it's actually one of the most interesting and tragic Tech Tales now being told in its entirety for the very first time the late 1900s were all about Innovation bringing things to the Forefront that previously just weren't possible and one of those used a sense but even today goes mostly wasted and that's our sense of smell Squarespace sponsor content is not filmed in smello Vision smello Vision was an attempt to add another dimension to our sensory entertainment a bit like a crap 4D Cinema you could get smello Vision collectible Simpsons cards you could get collectible smello Vision packs and cereal but for us in the UK it was the 1995 BBC children in need that a woke our senses children in need is a big campaign that the BBC runs every year to raise money KN 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 NL Edmunds kick off a KN of stench that might sound horrific and indeed in many ways 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 ever was on TV let's try smelling null Edmonds and see what we get oh psycho smells like Old Spice or brute it's actually quite nice but once You' done it the novelty kind of 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 Juke Nukem Tomb Raider and Leisure Suit Larry sounds fantastic right well it didn't really go as they had planned of course this concept was nothing new people had been injecting scents into theaters for over 100 years in 1868 a Rimmel scent was sprayed into the alambra theater of variety during the Magic Dance of the fairy acorn tree in 1916 the Rivoli Theater in New York would pump sents into the air for the film's story of flowers and in 1933 Paramount's Realto theater was rigged with a system to deliver various odors during films but these were all attempts to increase footfall in particular venues it was never intended to be integral to the film's essence various attempts were made to sell the idea as a more integrated part of the film including sento Vision demonstrated at New York's 1939 World Fair and General Electric smellorama 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 Aroma Rama 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 to smell the scenes among these are odors 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 sento vision that had now returned a smello vision created by Michael Todd and Hans Lube however both of these systems had problems ranging from lingering and synthetic odors distracting noises created by pushing odors 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 early attempt American film director John Waters would launch the film polyester in 1981 with scratch and sniff cards that revelers could use throughout as long as they could see them a trick that was repeated with various films and of of course 1995's BBC children in need so it was only a matter of time before this concept was applied to PCS and 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 you bought it was the winter of 1998 when Joel Bellon and Dexter Smith both Stanford graduates were on holiday in South Beach Florida and dreamt up the concept sitting around on the beach Bon 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 geks on the internet a taste of the outside world having previously launched a successful genan sequencing software company called Pangia systems and the website double twist bellinson a molecular biologist and Smith an Industrial Engineer had the knowhow they thought to put it to the test they could also get the initial Finance having already founded their own Venture Catalyst company Libra digital which had helped the likes of Mark Canter's broadland mechanics caner having previously founded macr media Upon returning from Florida to their base in California Bellon started investig ating the role genes play in detecting smells finding an experiment where neurobiologist Linda Buck engineered a virus to stimulate odor receptors she discovered that when odor molecules drift into the nose each of them binds with a particular protein on the surface of a neuron there are approximately 1,000 odor matching proteins across a human's 10 million odor detecting neurons when the shape of an Odin molecule matches the shape of a protein they lock together triggering the neuron and sending a signal to the brain which recognizes 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 odor 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 kit is out with a t-shirt bearing the brand of a logo Joel dived into his background first no I came out of Stanford um well first Harvard and chemistry Stanford biochem and international relations and I had come out of a Nobel prizewinning lab uh Paul Berg who had in you know invented recant DNA cutting and pasting and I ended up uh getting involved with pioneering DNA writing and reading synthesis and sequencing my friends uh girlfriend had found those jeans in rodents and uh Linda Buck she won the Nobel Prize and I leveraged her data and found the homologues in macac monkeys first and then humans and then we made threedimensional models of The receptors and then we modeled how fragrance molecules would stimulate those receptors and so we added that was how we indexed fragrances you since they're a collection of chemicals different ratios that each interact with all the different receptors to varying degrees and that became a way for indexing using the likes of smello vision for inspiration belling's idea then was to generate thousands of odors just by blending them with different proportions of 64 primary sents using this the recipes could be encoded in files and the chemical components held in printer likee cartridges could be combined and transmitted through a USB powered desktop device wafting them into the user Face On Demand after enticing various Executives from Sega NEC Sprint Trans America and Bath and Body Works offering knowledge of both Tech and the world of fragrances they formed Digis sense in February 1999 and got to work on developing their product a product that needed to be both software and Hardware in form although digent really wanted to concentrate on the software with their main intention of developing a fully fragrance internet Super Highway their idea was to develop this smell index they could license to websites and software developers whilst Outsourcing the hardware manufacturer to other companies this would for example allow you to test perfumes online get a whd of boffi pie from a food retailer send a virtual bouquet of flowers or even get a whiff of a fully interactive online world the fact of it smell bypasses the conscious brain and communicates directly with the lyic system meant it could evoke emotions that were literally uncontrollable a powerful tool to whoever wields it it's why Ms pipe food smells into the shops surrounding food cords now sponsor Squarespace may not have a smello vision feature probably for the best but it does have plenty of others and using blueprint AI is very easy to set up a site sickeningly so no reams of typing out HTML and stylesheets just a few clicks and you're done optim IED for SEO and mobile ready to go I particularly like how you can change color sets or fonts on the fly so it looks good whatever the style of your business or product just head to Squarespace to get started and then when you're ready squarespace.com Nostalgia nerd to get 10% off a website or domain 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 Bellon 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 real aroma.com had conceived of the ra HTML concept real Aroma hypertext markup language and even gested about a three vile contraption that essentially was supposed to do the exact same thing that Digis sense were working on they even had their own smell index using hex codes akin to selecting colors for a web page 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 the 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 I smell yes Apple would be proud armed with this and a range of sense Digis sense 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 stink bombs via email it seeped into every crevice it could find in fact it generated so much publicity that wide 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 tocom which is well worth checking out on the internet archive if you're not already familiar yeah it still smells the article Fe feed a detailed interview with Bellon Smith and indeed Mark caner who was Keen to use the technology across the internet synchronized with movies videos and music Charles Platt the interviewer writes Bellon 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 scenography is going to transform the entertainment media Spectrum all the way from web surfing to Hollywood movies we're sitting in bison's immaculately renovated 1920s apartment in Oakland California overlooking a grand Panorama of downtown and Lake Merit but no one's checking out the view we move closer to an IBM think pad that rests on an ornate glass top table Smith rolls the track Point Shifting the cursor Arrow to a picture of some green grapes he clicks on them beside the pink pad linked via serial cable sits a black plastic box 3 in tall 2 in wide and 5 in deep about the size of electric pencil sharpener somewhere inside it has a little fan that starts wearing drawing air in 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-in vent now I straighten up and give Bellon and Smith an apologetic look um it smells like cheap perfume Smith Scrolls to a picture of oranges he clicks on them once more I breathe deeply Orange here I report my hosts relax in their chairs looking immensely relieved caner 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 ah caner 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 would smoke caner cries with delight indeed the Box emits a smoky Tang without the smoke so by the end of 99 digent did at least have a mystery black box but looked nothing like their prototype but did in fact emit smells in that session 26 Cents were tested including Donkey Kong's bananas with plat commenting that the smell was cleared pretty quickly allowing for new fragrances to be delivered in Fairly rapid succession caner who is 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 all this worked four basic primaries and the they had 10 10x range we wish we could have done a bigger range I just figured you know if we can at least get to Market even with the Atari will eventually get to the the more sophisticated so from that uh the common in Torx is probably you know countless but certainly could 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's more cartoonish than elegant but still good enough to set the the vibe the 64 primaries Joel mentions are the base chemicals which can be combined to produce thousands of fragrances he show me how this would work with the industrial design version 2 which was ready before the start of the Millennium this is the industrial design of what it was going to look like sorry if it's a little Dy the goal was to jam then the functional one into this form factor being being this blue cartridge each one of these ridges was a different element activates via pzo electric like an inkjet printer so the top of the cartridge had p 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 these early prototypes show the circular cartridge to the right and the Bellows that would waft the fragrance out pretty neat [Music] so above all it's clear that Digis sense meant business and they intended to be taken seriously and it's smells it stinks there's odor that comes out of it depending on where you are in the game it's like it's like smello Vision right 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 sense you can even see a copy of that wi magazine in the foreground oh we have the smell of gunfire you have the smell of gunfire yeah here a little wh of that oh yeah well not that I I would know maybe you want to spell a swamp instead now clearly there was no prototype on hand that day 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 that's in part because by this point they also had three Rivals remember this was still the dot boom and if there was an idea you'd be sure that people would jump on it like flies to a Fest oh yeah W yeah that's wo that's powerful sweet banana this is concentrated okay never give you Pizza even an artificially fragranced [Music] shitfest the first of those was Aroma jet a Dallas company that was focusing on fragrancing video games albeit with a rather strange device worn around the neck then there was a company from Georgia SS who were promising to ship a simpler implementation but relied on water-based chemicals to keep it simple with have an example given by the company's founder Elwood Ivy Jr that it could simulate the odor of a brand new car but it couldn't simulate the precise Aroma of a 200 Nissan Ultima this product printed for scent and interestingly also for 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 Waring 50 the orders at that point finally there was an Israeli company selt which was just starting to get off the ground but it was Digis sense leading the way and as the year progressed things started to look even more enticing in May 200 it was announced that Digis sense would be partnering with EC candy.com to provide visitors with a total shopping experience including the sweet smells of the online merchandise with Ronnie Ali Ahmed co-founder of e candy.com stated eating

imagine yourself walking into a candy store the first thing you noticed is the smell later that month Proctor and Gamblin announced a research and distribution alliance with Digis sense giving access to png's research methods so it could gauge consumer reaction to adding smell of a product or the effect of including scent with a movie game or email uh we had relationships with craft Foods uh Proctor and Gamble and Unilever Proctor and Gamble is going to distribute the device uh one of their demands was that we uh do all the ruggedization testing which turned out to be very expensive cuz all those chemicals they crossreact with plastic and it's really a combinatoric problem and we um we got through it by this point over 2,000 game developers alone had also downloaded the Digis sense software development kit allowing them to integrate the technology with their latest titles so we had Partnerships with Microsoft for the Xbox and Sony for PlayStation 2 what did we do with like Laura Croft you know when uh you know animals were sometimes stalking her and you could smell them it was so exciting to see anything movies video games commercials with um with scent real networks also jumped on board allowing the real player software to be rigged up to dish out free fragrances on demand and even synchronize with media we added scent tracks to movies like Saving Private Ryan and soldiers are walking through the tall you know wild Fields you're smelling you know the grass and then you start smelling something nasty you know 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 Gene machines were appearing at trade shows and the general public were queuing to get a literal width of the action Digis sense were even hoping their competition would ramp up they envisaged an ecosystem of speaker sized products they dubbed as rers that could have their smell index licensed to run on them and sympathize with competitive products as well Yahoo internet life even published a special feature on the new ways to interact with the web smell touch and taste and as you can imagine basic human instincts were a driving force here something that Bellon mentioned in our interview the adult industry was all over it too by the way from literal body odors to you know 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 uh Jimmy Hendricks an electric guitar with talk of sweat and pheromones being pumped out of the humble little ice smell box things were really hotting up promises were made that I smell would be ready by early 2001 with a price tag of under $200 and scent cartridges posited to be available for under $50 each 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 fine tuned you could have specific cartridges for different applications and then you could have you want to just do a firstperson shooter well you're going to need a hell of a lot more of you know this you know gunpowder like that or if you're going to do a racing game you're going to need a lot more racing related smell of course you might expect knockoff carts to also appear for cheaper just like with inkjet ink but the Doom bubble was starting to burst and Digis sense knew they needed more money so we survived the Doom crash actually we raised a significant amount from a from two of the fragrance and flavor chemical companies Quest and jivon 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 still by April 2001 there were problems the Toronto Star ran a headline investors smell a rat a Digis sense it seemed to the media at least that investors were starting to question whether sniffing your computer was the way forward oh oh yeah that's a that's a swamp here you have that the reality according to Joel was a little different although most of their initial funding was gone on paper things still looked good they had secured some five ,000 deals with websites software and video game developers the SDK had been downloaded over 5,000 times Al loone and interest was strong and Sony had told us their experience every time they launched a new category of consumer electronics device uh 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 you're going to need at least another 100 million you should put this device in a million people's households free and so we all right we we need to do much bigger financing that we had planned and we went out and we did it and uh we lined it up uh Goldman Sachs was leading and jivon which who had already invested was going to be the you know the follow on and 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 jivon now uh 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 you know when we spun out of Hoffman lar Ro this was the very first investment that was made was into Digis sense 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 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 relaunch we've mentioned that eye smell could be used in cars or even for medical aromatherapy purposes but around them companies were still 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 you know cuz we had run out of cash we going to have to do a new financing on harsh terms and that was okay anything to survive right Morgan Stanley had someone who was a super big fan and he was determined to recapitalize us and so we were flying back and forth to New York from the Bay Area they never quite had the right people in the room now here's the Wild Thing uh my business partner's family was going through some real difficulties I wanted to help him out you know he and I have been best friends for a long time so I canceled 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 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 a.m. 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 you know on the floor pretty much that it hit but you know 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 so since several of his buddies had died you know everything was just up in the air after that so 911 was really what put the final kabash on us and so you know maybe this is a sign Dexter and I running full blast since the late 80s and um and we just said you know what maybe it's time to take a break by the end of 2001 the company was was disbanded and the stink dream was no more I asked Joel what he might have done differently and whether that may have helped for company uh if I had to do anything differently I would have gone with a simpler device and and not try to be as ambitious that would be our main critique but nonetheless even though we were trying we were aiming too high it was coming together and unfortunately uh with that boardroom battle at jivon and that was just a blow from which we didn't end up recovering just like Digis sense the other products really failed to come to any sort of fruition as well the demand and the money simply weren't there although Aroma jet is still listed on the microfab Technologies website and trien did eventually test launch their scent Dome it was tested by ISP Telly West in 2004 the Dome could create 60 different smells and used codes embedded in an email or web page to produce them but the funky little device had no way to waft sense towards the user and it never really got passed for testing stage since then various companies have tried to do the same including Integrations with VR which arguably would be pretty neat and in fact Sony just this year announced conceptual technology to allow Gamers to smell their games Sony is introducing smell a vision at the consumer electronic show in Vegas this week the goal is to make gaming as immersive for 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 in Alien Isolation you could tell by smell if the alien was near you'd even be able to know what the aliens smelt like or imagine having to mask odors in Hitman to prevent detection but it could also be a curse can you imagine it being being built into your phone and serving adverts you'd be sitting there at a bus stop and suddenly get a whiff of Mark Zuckerberg's beard as an unwelcome advert seeped out of your pocket I for one and grateful but it didn't get that far I like to control the fragrances around me if I can the world's first scented mobile game experience however it would have been could have been cool and regardless the technology behind dig sense didn't go to waste we started another company we used some of what we had learned with Digis Sense 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 of double twist was a Uganda so when I discovered these drugs he hooked me up with the ministry of healthare the head of the World Bank uh for Africa bumped into me recognized me from the news and gave my name to the uh prime minister and they appointed me an advisor uh to the president of Uganda uh for life science and Agra business and um so it came you know back in fourth and then they 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 think outside of the box look you're not married you don't have kids come here so I I moved here full-time in 2012 and um I've subsequently used that same methodology for my current company that I have a partner with in Belgium a genom matrix where we have digitized the sense of taste and we work with food and beverage companies in Europe and Asia helping them uh reformulate their product to accommodate different dietary niches either for health reasons or eth tecal reasons sometimes you just have to let go of something for it actually to become what it needs to be until next time I've been Nostalgia nerd too L if you enjoyed this video then you'll probably enjoy my previous video which is about the Trojan room coffee pot it's actually really interesting and features an interview with the Creator patreon members you can access the full interview with Joel at your leisure [Applause]

2025-03-03 13:44

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