Digital Device that gives you any kind of Taste – Virtual Food

Adhering to smartness and uniqueness of things, innovations overwhelmed for the past years giving forth smart-watch, Smart-TVs, smart-rings, smart-tattoos, smart-spinach and now a new device has become smart enough to give you any kind of taste virtually. So, you’ll be licking the device to pacify your tongue.

A Japanese researcher from Meiji University, Tokyo has innovated a handheld “taste display” device that when inserted into your mouth can recreate all taste sensations associated with food.

The lickable screen, called the “Norimaki Synthesizer” uses five different gels exploiting electrolytes, each corresponding to the five tastes of the human tongue – salty, acidic, bitter, sweet and umami. The synthesizer employs electrophoresis process, a technique used to separate protein molecules based on their size and electrical charge. 

On application of an electrical charge, the microscopic particles migrate to a particular tube, upon which the taste gets intensified more over others. The taste perception could be compared to the vision’s, says Homei Miyashita, the researcher behind this. As images on a screen are just combinations of continuously pulsating red, green and blue pixels at various intensities, the concept could be manipulated to the five-tube gels, serving you the taste.

“Like an optical display that uses lights of three basic colors to produce arbitrary colors,” Miyashita said in his research paper published on the Meiji University web site, “this display can synthesize and distribute arbitrary tastes together with the data acquired by taste sensors.”

The device fooled participants into experiencing “the flavor of everything from gummy candy to sushi without having to place a single item of food in their mouths,” Miyashita says.

Why the device has been created?

While Norimaki seems to be kind of fun-oriented or pleasure-giving ones pacifying your tongue though you are eating a bitter-guard, the device for example, might helpful for hypertension people who must restrict salt intake, adding less salt to the actual food and licking the salty flavor of the device.

He says the technology could add “a whole new medium to multimedia experiences.”

It may also be helpful for weight-loss people who wants just to taste the food, but not eat it.

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The idea of this was spurred in Miyashita back in 2011, when he came to know Hiromi Nakamura, a researchers working on ‘augmented gustation’, which involves sending electrical charges through chop sticks, forks and straws to create tastes, that humans could not perceive solely with their tongues.

Lickable TV

The professor hadn’t leave the synthesizer behind, to be just a device but incorporated into TV – developed a prototype lickable TV screen that can imitate food flavors.

The device, called Taste the TV (TTTV), uses a carousel of 10 flavor canisters that spray in combination to create the taste of a particular food. The flavour sample then rolls on hygienic film over a flat TV screen for the viewer to try.