VR is incredibly immersive for sight and sound, developers are making headway into touch, and even smell is starting to appear, for better or worse. That just leaves one last sense – and whether or not anyone actually wants to taste virtual worlds, a new device is now tackling that final frontier.
Taste is a pretty personal sense – and not just because it involves putting stuff in your mouth. It varies wildly person to person, and even bite to bite. What danced across your palate in the first mouthful becomes a sickly chore by the end of the meal.
Digitally recreating the complex chemistry between your food and your tongue is a major challenge, but a new device called the e-Taste is giving it a red-hot go.
Previous research has tried zapping the tongue with electrical and thermal signals, and mixing in colored lights and scents to trick people into thinking a boring old glass of water was a customizable cocktail. The new study, from researchers at Ohio State University, takes a different approach – it’s actually pumping flavored chemicals into your face.
It starts by breaking down the five basic tastes into associated chemicals, mixing them together to represent different foods, and squirting the mixture into your mouth. So, glucose is used for sweet flavors obviously, and salty is… well, salt. There’s also citric acid for sour, magnesium chloride for bitter, and glutamate for umami.
These chemicals are all housed in their own little capsules inside the e-Taste device, and released in different combinations and concentrations to simulate different foods. So for instance, fruit juice might be two parts sweet to three parts sour, while roast chicken is two parts umami to one part salty.
When you get your virtual meal, the e-Taste cooks up the recipe and releases a couple drops of the concoction straight to your tongue. The researchers even showed that the flavors can be released remotely through an online connection, which has both fun and truly insidious implications.
As you might expect, results are mixed so far. The team tested it out by getting people to try to identify five different foods based on what they were tasting. They were pretty good at recognizing virtual lemonade and cake, it turns out, but they tended to get the fried egg, fish soup and coffee flavors confused.
Still, it’s a pretty cool idea, and the team has plans to improve the e-Taste with more chemical compounds for more realistic recreations. One day we might even be able to taste the umami sensation of the mushrooms Mario has been chowing down for decades.
The research was published in the journal Science Advances.
Source: Ohio State University