The only movie released in Smell-O-Vision piped 30 odors under the seats
Inventor Hans Laube called the mechanism the "smell brain": a belt of perfume containers wound onto a motorized reel, cued by markers on the film print, with needles puncturing a membrane so fans could push the scent down the pipes. One character was identified to the audience by the smell of his pipe tobacco. Outfitting a theater cost between $15,000 and $1,000,000.
- ▪Inventor Hans Laube called the mechanism the "smell brain": a belt of perfume containers wound onto a motorized reel, cued by markers on the film print, with needles puncturing a membrane so fans could push the scent down the pipes.
- ▪One character was identified to the audience by the smell of his pipe tobacco.
- ▪Outfitting a theater cost between $15,000 and $1,000,000.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/07/30/smell-o-vision.html |
| Publication time | Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-30T14:42:06.611Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-30T14:42:06.611Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | _AGQxaOoiyK- · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The only movie released in Smell-O-Vision piped 30 odors under the seats Ellsworth Toohey 7:00 am Thu Jul 30, 2026 Smell-O-Vision — Gmhofmann / CC BY-SA 3.0 (Wikimedia Commons) The 1960 mystery-comedy Scent of Mystery was the only film ever released in Smell-O-Vision, which delivered 30 odors to vents under the theater seats. Inventor Hans Laube called the mechanism the "smell brain": a belt of perfume containers wound onto a motorized reel, cued by markers on the film print, with needles puncturing a membrane so fans could push the scent down the pipes. One character was identified to the audience by the smell of his pipe tobacco. Outfitting a theater cost between $15,000 and $1,000,000.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
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