Olly The Smelly Robot: Is That Bacon? Nah, It’s Just a Twitter Alert

Kickstarter is full of interesting, magical things (and a lot of ridiculously useless crap) and I love trolling around to see who’s  getting funded. It’s a great chance to laugh at the state of humanity or cry over our stupidity, and discover interesting projects that would have otherwise never gotten past the drawing board. So when I found Olly: The Web Connected Smelly Robot, I wasn’t really sure how to classify it. Cutesy, enjoyable technology or totally dumb money sink? I’m going with the former simply because of the name Olly the Smelly Robot and the potential for hilarity.

Olly The Smelly Robot: Because Nothing Says Check Your Email Like a Whiff of Patchouli

So here’s the idea- instead of an audible or visual alert to let you know something’s happening at your computer, you can have the smell of your choice waft lazily through the room, and theoretically you’ll smell it before it dissipates. It’s actually sort of a cute idea, especially when you pair it with the fact that Olly the Smelly Robot is completely customisable. You can change the way he looks (I’d say calling it a ‘he’ is fair, what with the manly tendency to emit smells to communicate.) All of the internals are accessible and instructions for hacking are readily available. The creators are excited team up with developers for new apps and an API in the future. In terms of an interesting and “open-source” product, Olly certainly allows you a lot of freedom. Olly’s team are working on smell modules for him, but you can use pretty much anything that has a smell that can be pushed by a fan.

The Ollyfactory site suggests essential oils, a slice of fruit, your partner’s perfume or even a drop of gin. I can understand this, what with smells being tied to memory and imagination; if you can’t be around your girlfriend, it would probably be pretty pleasant to catch a hint of her perfume letting you know she’s just sexted you. But think of the potential for abuse on the flipside- one night stand you’re desperate to avoid? You can put a drop of fish oil in there. Outside of the fact I’m going to hell, I can only imagine how butthurt people could possibly get choosing on the smells you decide to assign to them. Annoying bro = dregs of a PBR. Work emails = hunk of cheese. Is there any way to make Twitter smell like bird shit?

Regardless, the idea has a lot of potential, so if you’re interested in getting Olly the Smelly Robot for yourself, head over to their kickstarter page and pledge, or find yourself a 3d printer and you can actually make one yourself from their detailed blog here. It’s worth a look just for the intricate process they’ve gone through to get Olly off the ground, including a ton of sketches and some kitchen wizard prototypes. They also just announced a companion for Olly: Molly, which counts links to Twitter and will count your retweets. Reach a number of retweets that you specify, and Molly will dispense a treat. Videos on both Olly and Molly can both be found at the kickstarter page.