Tasteful web design:

March 7, 2001 12:17 PM

Tasteful web design: Remember how a couple of companies came up with the brilliant idea of putting smell-o-vision on your PC? Now one of them has realized that there's another sense left to exploit.
posted by harmful (9 comments total)

This takes cybersex to a whole new level.
posted by boylog at 12:21 PM on March 7, 2001

Ohfercryinoutloud. Back when I ran Running Tally, the tagline on the banner ad I made was "so good you can lick your monitor." If Trisenx have their way, you actually could. Or at least the potato wafer.

The only kind of site I think this could be useful for would be cooking/recipe sites (and, uh... Chris' suggestion)... though maybe I'm not thinking outside the mouth enough?
posted by jason at 12:23 PM on March 7, 2001

Meet George Jetson.....
posted by tj at 12:48 PM on March 7, 2001

The Food Network always seemed like the one place I might actually want smell-o-vision. I'm not sure the flavor-sprayed-chip idea would work even there, without the texture to go along with it. (I suspect the same could be said of boylog's suggestion.)
posted by harmful at 1:13 PM on March 7, 2001

Hmmm, an all new specialty paper isle in OfficeMax....
posted by tj at 1:23 PM on March 7, 2001

Of course, the disappointment comes when you find that MetaFilter tastes like chicken.
posted by hijinx at 1:32 PM on March 7, 2001

haw! Usually when new technology comes out I'm excited, but not this. I see no use for it, at least at this point. I'd rather wait for a Jetsons' style food-maker, you know, press a few buttons, out comes a six course meal. That type-a thing. Speaking of which, favorite future Jetsons' invention?
posted by tiaka at 1:48 PM on March 7, 2001

This takes cybersex to a whole new level.

If you can smell and taste your partner, you're not cyber-anything-ing anymore.

Apple will probably be the first to include this technology in their systems, as Steve Jobs once described the Aqua UI as "lickable." Unfortunately, all it tastes like is... water.
posted by kindall at 3:30 PM on March 7, 2001

I would have looked at this ZDNet piece, but I got distracted by the new-format ad they were thoughtful enough to plunk down in the middle, oh, say, 85% of the page. The thing that really reaches out and grabs you, though, is that it isn't an ad at all -- it's a thoughtful "About Our New Ad Format" infomercial. (At least it was on first clickthrough, or whatever they're calling it now -- the things are apparently randomized so sometimes they advertise one sponsor, sometimes another, and sometimes they don't appear at all.) Imagine my surprise when I was invited to Click Here For a Demo! Imagine my delight at the prospect of paying good dough to my cable-modem provider so I could see not an ad, but a demo for one! Imagine the neck-snapping, just-slightly-subsonic speed at which I moused away!

So, umm, the Smell-a-Vision piece may have been real interesting, but I guess I'll never know.
posted by BB at 4:48 PM on March 8, 2001