I HAVE been to the future and it smells. It smells like . . . But I'm getting ahead of myself.

For centuries, technology has struggled to catch up with human perception. The eye perceives motion, but until the 20th century, mankind made do with static representations of the visual field. The ear hears, but the first recordings did not come along until the late 19th century, and films did not add sound until the 1920's. And what about the nose?

The nose, treated as a third-class citizen, is finally getting the attention it deserves. And for food lovers, it's not a moment too soon.

The nasal perspective was given its due this week at a panel discussion and demonstration organized by DigiScents, a company in Oakland, Calif., that sees the Internet as one huge smelly online opportunity. If its vision of the future is correct, every personal computer will come with a plug-in apparatus, analogous to a printer, that wafts odors in the general direction of the user's nose. Users download images and sound. Why not smell?

On Monday, a thundering herd of experts gathered in the Nose Room of Trattoria dell'Arte in Midtown, ostensibly to thrash out the olfactory issues, but actually to give the hard sell for the company's smell machine, which it calls iSmell. Joel Bellenson, the chief executive officer of DigiScents, led the charge. A soft-spoken, portly man with a beatnik goatee, he emphasized the artistic possibilities of iSmell by wearing a maroon beret and a loose rayon shirt decorated with paint splashes.

Two messages came across loud and clear. First, iSmell is a wonderful thing and a boon to humankind. Perhaps not as important as the wheel, but much more fun. Second, the human olfactory system is enormously complex, underserved by industry and a potential gold mine. Doron Lancet, the director of the Crown Human Genome Center at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, pointed out that humans have four genes for vision, but 1,000 genes that govern olfaction, accounting for about 2 percent of the human gene total. We may eat first with the eyes, but not very well, apparently. Taste receptors have their limitations too. ''A lot of what we know as food flavor is actually olfactory,'' said Harry Lawless, a professor of food science at Cornell University.

What's more, the nose seems to lead more directly to the emotions than the eye or ear. Avery Gilbert, the vice president of sensory research and development at DigiScents, pointed out that nonolfactory perception gets routed to the hypothalamus and then on to the cortex for further analysis, while smells proceed directly to the areas of the brain responsible for emotions and memories. Mr. Gilbert, in a fanciful moment, looked forward to the day when scientists would be able to generate ''the smell of fear and the smell of success.'' That would be New York's official fragrance.

We'll all have to wait for the smell of fear, which should be ready just in time for ''Scream 12.'' I was ready to settle for a whiff of orange. After the visionary talk was over, the audience headed off to a demonstration of iSmell. By this point, I more or less understood the principles involved.

The magic machine contained a cassette with a ''palette'' of 128 chemical odors that could be combined to generate an almost infinite number (actually, 10 to the 120th power) of smells by software programmed with mathematical models of specific odors. Users, by clicking on a mouse, could manipulate the mixture of scents to create a signature perfume, or simply create new, weird smells (and e-mail them). Or they could summon up a specific smell corresponding to an image on the screen. Or they could passively receive the smells encoded in, say, a game. Computer game companies have jumped at the chance to do deals with DigiScents, which plans to start selling i- Smell early next year for $50 to $200.

I could feel deep skepticism seeping into my every pore as the futurefest proceeded. Smell-O-Vision was supposed to transform the moviegoing experience, too. Where is it now? But sharper minds than mine have sniffed at the new technology and they are not laughing. Procter & Gamble, for example, recently signed an agreement with DigiScents to share research. And other companies are following the Internet scent trail.

AromaJet.com is working with video game companies to add smell as a sensory component to their products. A company called TriSenx has developed scent-producing hardware, MultiSSENX, that it plans to sell for less than $25. It has also developed a product called FirstSENX that allows users to print scent sheets on cards or apply flavors to a thin sheet of potato starch, a little like a communion wafer.

The implications for the food industry are mind-boggling. Shopping online for truffles or barbecue sauce or fancy coffee would become a multidimensional experience, involving smell and sight. Restaurants could add aroma to their online menus. When Mario Batali throws garlic in the pan on the Food Network, viewers would not only hear it sizzle in the olive oil but smell the intoxicating perfume.

There were two iSmells to try. An early version looked like a clock radio minus the face and dials. A long copper tube with a nozzle at the end snaked over the box, ready to broadcast odor. I sat down and looked at a laptop screen, where a woman was pouring orange juice into a glass. A puff of air blew across my face, bearing the unmistakable aroma of orange juice. There was a faintly alcoholic undertone to the smell, as though it were an orange perfume rather than a real orange, but the orangeness could not be denied. It was there.

Onscreen, the scene shifted. I was now entering a cave. A cave that smelled like oranges. That was the problem with early iSmell: an inability to shift gears quickly. Smoothing out that glitch led to second-generation iSmell, a black box that looks a little like an electric pencil sharpener outfitted with the tube from a bronchial inhaler. The screen showed an online supermarket, with the different departments represented by icons. I clicked on pastry, then on a pecan pie. It smelled like a banana. Was this a banana-pecan pie? I tried chocolate chip cookies. Banana again.

Three possibilities suggested themselves. First, a banana had bolted from the produce department and was hiding among the pastries. Second, I suffered from a disorder in which sugar of any kind triggered a banana response. Third, it's extremely difficult to reproduce certain families of smells. Fear, yes. A chocolate chip? Perhaps not in our lifetime.

Photo: WWW.INHALE -- Jean-Louis Grauby of Drom Fragrances sniffs for ice cream on iSmell. (Barbara Alper for The New York Times)(pg. F6) Drawing (Stuart Goldenberg)