Imagine that you are video chat with a distant friend who lunches, and your friend's sandwich looks great. What if you could ask your friend to dip a sensor in the meal and give you a taste?
Snacking remotely has come 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, report his adviser Jinghua Li and their colleagues to taste volunteers to taste to distant sample, fried eggs, Cake and fish soup.
In an interview, Mr. Jia discussed a photo of him who modeled one version of a device that he and his colleagues built, dependent on microfluidics. Dangling out of his lip what looks like five or six sauce packages that you would add to instant windows. The packages feed in a small tube in his mouth. When miniature pumps in the packages receive a signal from a sensor that is immersed in a far road, they go to work. In this case, the aim of the researchers was to accurately transfer the taste of a glass of lemonade.
In a more complex version of the setup, packages that contain a variety of fabrics such as salt water, citric acid and glucose in a semicircle on a table, so that a person can receive other flavors at the end of the tube.
Why, could you ask, would you like to taste someone else's fish soup? Mr Jia points out that it is everyday to be able to see and hear what is far away. Why not be able to taste it? Or maybe you want to taste recipes in a cookbook before you undertake to make them. Perhaps there is once a button on online shopping services, so that you can taste almost different hot sauces before you buy them.
At the moment these scenarios may seem a bit erratic and the device, to say the least, a bit cumbersome. The researchers behind the new paper, however, are not the only ones who work on devices that can enable us to taste and smell things that are not in our immediate environment.
“There are people who try to do it with direct electrical stimulation on your tongue,” said Mr. Jia. “There are people who try to use other ways to deliver the chemicals. We use a water pump. “
In this article, the pump of the team sent various concentrations of lemonade flasks to volunteers. They showed that the participants of the research could reliably assess the samples through acidity. Whether the researchers baptized a sensor in lemonade to generate the taste, or just used a recipe to mix chemicals transmitted by the pump, the effects were similar.
When volunteers were sent the flavors of coffee, fried eggs, cake, lemonade and fish soup that were generated via chemical recipes, they could correctly identify which of the five flavors they were usually fed. With a greater variety of chemicals and more recipes, more foods can be simulated, the researchers suggest.
However, it is more difficult than it sounds: not all flavors are just as easy to simulate. When you work with small amounts of liquid, it can be difficult to nail the concentrations of taste molecules, so that a subject has an experience that is comparable to the real work. The scent and texture of food and drinks are also intertwined with the experience of taste. Think of the aroma of coffee and the way in which the liquid always feels so slightly thicker than water.
“Everything has to come together to say,” This is good coffee, “said Mr. Jia.” A drop of chemicals on your tongue will feel different. “
The team is now investigating whether vague vibrations on the tongue may help to simulate food texture. They are also curious whether scents can be used to complete the sensory image. And they think they might get the miniature pumps a little more miniature.
Ideally, you do not have to dangle such a device from your lip. One day the entire affair might be pretty graceful – a medallion or a pendant who broadcasts flavors from far away.
