Good news for people who have sat at their computer and thought ‘gee, the one thing missing is the taste of fish soup’.
Fish soup, lemonade and fried egg were three of the delectable options on offer for participants of a study trialling a new virtual “e-taste” food experience.
And while that may sound like a scene cut straight from Severance, this Back Page correspondent is only too pleased to inform you that a sensor-actuator-coupled gustatory interface chemically connecting virtual and real environments for the purposes of remote tasting not only exists, but was the recent subject of a study published in Science Advances.
The system uses sensors that recognise chemicals representing the five basic tastes – sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami.
These sensors can capture the “taste” of a food as an electrical signal and transmit that data to a remote location, where it can be replicated and turned back into a gel and squeezed onto the mouth of the eager e-taster.
“Based on the digital instruction, you can also choose to release one or several different tastes simultaneously so that they can form different sensations,” said lead author Dr Jinghua Li, a materials science researcher at Ohio State University.
One of the tests of the e-taste technology involved 10 subjects being asked to identify five foods transmitted by the system.
These included:
- Lemonade, which is primarily made up of sweet and sour components;
- Cake, which is just sweet;
- Fried egg, which is primarily umami with some salty;
- Fish soup, a more salt-heavy combination of salty and umami;
- Coffee, which featured a combination of bitter, sweet and sour.
While lemonade and cake were successfully identified by all 10 participants, the fish soup and coffee were confused with fried egg in some cases.
Another assessment of the e-taste technology saw the virtual food experience initiated in Ohio and transmitted all the way to California.
The next step, according to Professor Li, is miniaturising the system and adding in new chemical compounds to produce a wider range of taste sensations.
“This will help people connect in virtual spaces in never-before-seen ways,” she said.
“This concept is here and it is a good first step to becoming a small part of the metaverse.”
While virtual reality is the obvious application, the findings also potentially provide new clues on how the brain processes taste – a step forward in treatment for people who lost taste as a result of long covid.
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