The device also mimics lemonade and coffee—but fried eggs? Not so much.
“That Cajun blackened shrimp recipe looks really good,” I tell my husband while scrolling through cooking videos online. The presenter describes it well: juicy, plump, smoky, a parade of spices. Without making the dish, I can only imagine how it tastes. But a new device inches us closer to recreating tastes from the digital world directly in our mouths.
Smaller than a stamp, it contains a slurry of chemicals representing primary flavors like salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and savory (or umami). The reusable device mixes these together to mimic the taste of coffee, cake, and other foods and drinks.
Developed by researchers at Ohio State University, the device has a tiny gum-like strip linked to a liquid reservoir. It releases each taste component in a gel and pumps the resulting blend onto the tongue. The system is wireless and includes a sensor to control the chemical mixture. In a demonstration, one person dipped the sensor into some lemonade in San Francisco and transferred a facsimile of the taste to people wearing the devices in Ohio in real-time.
Complex flavor profiles—say, a fried egg—are harder to simulate. And it’s likely awkward to have a device dangling on your mouth. But the work brings us a little closer to adding a new sense to virtual and augmented reality and making video games more immersive.
“This will help people connect in virtual spaces in never-before-seen ways,” study author Jinghua Li said in a press release. “This concept is here, and it is a good first step to becoming a small part of the metaverse.”
Gaming aside, future iterations of the device could potentially help people who have lost their sense of taste, including those living with long Covid or traumatic brain injuries.
What’s Taste, Anyways?
We can taste food thanks to a variety of chemicals stimulating our taste buds. There are five main types of taste bud, each specializing in a different taste. When we chew food, our taste buds send electrical signals to the brain where they combine into a host of flavors—the bitterness of coffee, tanginess of a cup of orange juice, or richness of a buttery croissant.
But taste isn’t an isolated sensation. Smells, textures, memories, and emotions also come into play. One spoon of comfort food can take you back to happy days as a child. That magic is hard to replicate with a few spurts of chemical flavor and is partly why taste is so hard to recreate in digital worlds, wrote the team.
Virtual and augmented reality have mainly focused on audio and visual cues. Adding smell or taste could make experiences more immersive. An early version of the idea, dubbed Smell-O-Vision, dates back nearly a century when scents were released in theaters to heighten the film experience. It’s still employed in 4DX theaters today.
Cinema isn’t the only industry looking for a multi-sensory upgrade. At this year’s CES, a trailer for Sony’s hit game, The Last of Us, showed the technology at work in an immersive, room-size version of the game where players could smell the post-apocalyptic world.
Taste is harder to recreate. Older methods activated taste buds with electrical zaps to the tongue. While participants could detect very basic tastes, hooking your tongue up to electrodes isn’t the most comfortable setup.
More recently, a Hong Kong team developed a lollipop-like device that produces nine tastes embedded in food-safe gels. An electrical zap releases the chemicals, and upping the voltage delivers a stronger flavor. The approach is an improvement, but holding a lollipop in your mouth while gaming for hours is still awkward.
Tasty Interface
The new device offers a neater solution. Dubbed e-Taste, it has two main components: a sensing platform to analyze the taste profile of a food or drink and an actuator to deliver a mixture of liquid chemicals approximating the sampled taste.
The actuator, a cube the size of a shirt button and a gum-like strip, hangs on the lower teeth. The cube stores chemicals mimicking each of five tastes—glucose for sweet and citric acid for sour, for example—in separate chambers. A tiny pump, activated by an electrical zap, pushes the liquids onto a gel strip where they mingle before being pumped onto the tongue. Each pump is the equivalent of a drop of water, which is enough to activate taste buds.
A person using the device holds the strip inside their mouth with the cube dangling outside. Once the sensor captures a food or drink’s flavor profile—say, equal amounts of sweet, sour, salty, and savory—it wirelessly transmits the data to the actuator which releases the final taste mixture for roughly 45 minutes—plenty of time to experience a virtual foodie session.
Eat Digital Cake
After training e-Taste to understand which chemical mixtures best approximate various foods, the team asked 10 volunteers to name the food they were tasting from a list of possibilities.
Roughly 90 percent could pick out lemonade and gauge its sourness. Most could also identify the taste of cake. But not all foods were so easily mimicked. Participants struggled to name umami-heavy dishes, such as fried eggs or fish stew.
Rather than a bug in the device, however, this is an expected result. Taste is highly subjective. Our tolerance to spice or sourness varies largely.
Then there’s the weirdness of a virtual setup. We eat and drink with our eyes open and smell food too. One participant said that tasting coffee through the device without seeing a normal coffee maker led to some confusion. Scientists have long known the color of food is essential to our perception of flavor. Smell and texture are also crucial. The smell of a good southern barbeque joint sets expectations—even before we’ve tasted anything.
The team is exploring ways to enhance the experience by adding these senses. Shrinking the device is also on the menu.
Although the team developed e-Taste to enhance gaming, people could use something like it to sample food across the globe or items when grocery shopping online. Doctors could use it to detect if people have lost their sense of taste, an early indication of multiple diseases, including viral infections and Alzheimer’s disease. And more sophisticated versions could one day augment taste in people who’ve lost it.
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* This article was originally published at Singularity Hub
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