It’s Like Virtual Reality Goggles for Your Mouth
The New York Times
Scientists tested a device that helped volunteers taste flavors meant to represent distant samples of coffee, lemonade, fried eggs, cake and fish soup.
Imagine you are video chatting with a distant friend who is eating lunch, and your pal’s sandwich looks delicious. What if you could ask your friend to dip a sensor into the meal, and give you a taste?
Remote snacking has moved a bit closer to virtual reality. In a paper on Friday in the journal Science Advances, Yizhen Jia, a graduate student in materials engineering at Ohio State University, his adviser Jinghua Li and their colleagues report that they helped volunteers taste flavors meant to represent distant samples of coffee, lemonade, fried eggs, cake and fish soup.
In an interview, Mr. Jia discussed a picture of him modeling one version of a device he and his colleagues built, which relies on microfluidics. Dangling from his lip are what look like five or six sauce packets that you’d add to instant ramen. The packets feed into a little tube slipped into his mouth. When miniature pumps in the packets receive a signal from a sensor dipped into a fluid far away, they get to work. In this case, the researchers’ aim was to accurately transmit the taste of a glass of lemonade.
In a more complex version of the setup, packets containing a variety of substances such as salt water, citric acid and glucose are arrayed in a semicircle on a table, allowing a person at the end of the tube to receive other tastes.
Why, you might ask, would you want to taste someone else’s fish soup? Mr. Jia points out that it’s commonplace to be able to see and hear what’s going on far away. Why not be able to taste it? Or maybe you’d like to taste recipes in a cookbook before you commit to making them. Maybe someday there might be a button on online grocery shopping services so you could virtually taste test different hot sauces before buying them.
Right now, these scenarios might seem a bit whimsical and the device, to put it mildly, a tad cumbersome. The researchers behind the new paper, however, are not the only ones working on devices that could allow us to taste and smell things that are not in our immediate vicinity.
