Imagine you're having a video chat with a distant friend eating lunch, and your fellow sandwiches look tasty. What if you could ask a friend to soak the sensor in their meal and give it a taste?
Remote snacks have come a little closer to virtual reality. In a paper in the journal Science Advances Friday, Yizhen Jia, a graduate student in materials engineering at Ohio State University, reports that his advisor Jinghua Li and colleagues helped volunteers taste the flavors that meant representing distant samples of coffee, lemonade, fried eggs, cakes and fish soup.
In an interview, Jia discussed his photographs modeling one version of the device he and his colleagues rely on microfluids. Hanging from his lips is what appears to be five or six sauce packets to add to instant ramen. Pucket fed a small tube that slid into his mouth. When the miniature pumps in the packet receive a signal from a sensor immersed in a liquid at a distance, they get to work. In this case, the researcher's goal was to accurately convey the taste of a glass of lemonade.
In a more complicated version of the setup, packets containing various substances such as saline, citric acid, and glucose are placed in semicircles of the table, allowing those at the edge of the tube to receive other preferences.
Why, you might ask, do you want to taste someone else's fish soup? Jia points out that it's only natural that you can see and hear what's going on in the distance. Why can't I taste it? Or you might want to taste the recipe in a cookbook before you promise to make it. One day there may be a button on the online grocery shopping service, so you can virtually test out a variety of hot sauces before you buy.
Nowadays, these scenarios may seem a bit whimsical and device-like. However, the researchers behind the new paper are not the only researchers working on devices that can taste and smell things that are not close to us.
“There are people who are trying to do it with electrical stimulation directly on your tongue,” Zia said. “There are people who are trying to use other methods to deliver chemicals. They use water pumps.”
In this paper, the team's pump sent volunteers different concentrations of lemonade flavoring. They demonstrated that participants in this study could reliably evaluate samples by sourness. The effects were similar, even when researchers immersed the sensor in lemonade to produce flavors, or simply mixing chemicals pumped using recipes.
When volunteers were sent the flavors of coffee, fried eggs, cakes, lemonade and fish soup produced via chemical recipes, they were able to correctly identify which of the five flavors they were fed in most cases. Researchers suggest that a wide variety of chemicals and more recipes can simulate more foods.
However, it's more difficult than you think. Not all preferences can be simulated as well. When using small amounts of liquid, it is difficult to nail the concentration of taste molecules so that subjects have similar experiences to the real thing. The smell and texture of the food and drink also intertwines with the taste experience. Think about the aroma of coffee and how the liquid feels so thicker than water.
“In order for you to say, 'This is delicious coffee,' it all has to come together,” Zia said. “A drop of chemicals on your tongue will feel different.”
The team is currently investigating whether faint vibrations on the tongue can simulate food texture. I'm also curious if I can use scents to help end the picture of my senses. And they think that the miniature pump could be a little more miniature.
Ideally, there is no need to hang such a device from your lips. One day, perhaps, the whole incident may be very inconvenient. It is a rocket or pendant, and conveys taste from afar.
