Imagine you’re chatting via a video with a distant lunch friend and your friend’s sandwich looks delicious. What if you could ask your friend to sink a sensor at lunch and give you a taste?
The remote snack has moved a little closer to the virtual reality. In a document on Friday at Science Advances Magazine, Yizhen Jia, a postgraduate student in the engineering engineering at the University of Ohio, Jinghua Li’s adviser and their associates report that they have helped the volunteers to taste flavors intended to represent long -range coffee,
In an interview, Mr. Jia discussed a photo of him to model a version of a device built by him and his colleagues, which is based on the little ones. Winging from his lip is the one that looks like five or six packages of sauce you will add to the Instant Ramen. The packages feed on a small tube slipped into his mouth. When the tiny pumps in the packages receive a signal from a sensor sinking into a fluid away, they get to work. In this case, the aim of the researchers was to accurately transmit the taste of a glass of lemonade.
In a more complicated version of the installation, packages containing a variety of substances such as salty water, citric acid and glucose are placed in a semicircle on a table, allowing a person at the end of the pipe to receive other tastes.
Why, you might ask, would you like to try someone else’s fish soup? Mr. Jia points out that it is common to be able to see and hear what is going on far away. Why not try it? Or maybe you would like to try recipes in a cookbook before committing to make them. Maybe someday there may be a button on shopping services online grocery so you can essentially try different hot sauces before buying them.
At the moment, these scenarios may look a bit fantastic and the device, to put it gently, a difficult cumbersome. However, the researchers behind the new paper are not the only ones working on devices that could allow us to try and smell things that are not in immediate proximity.
“There are people who try to do so with immediate electrical stimulation in your language,” Mr Jia said. “There are people trying to use other ways to deliver chemicals. We use a water pump.”
In this work, the team’s pump sent various concentrations of lemonade aroma to volunteers. They showed that the study participants could reliably evaluate samples from Sourness. Whether the researchers sank a sensor in the lemonade to create the taste, or simply used a recipe to mix chemicals transmitted by the pump, the results were similar.
When the volunteers sent the flavors of coffee, fried eggs, cakes, lemonade and fish soup produced through chemical recipes, they were able to correctly identify which of the five tastes were fueled most of the time. With a wider variety of chemicals and more recipes, more food could be simulated, the researchers suggest.
It is more difficult than it sounds, however: Not all tastes are just as easy to simulate. When working with tiny amounts of liquid, it can be difficult to nail the concentrations of taste molecules so that a theme has an experience similar to the real thing. The smell and texture of food and drink are interrelated with the experience of taste, too. Think of the aroma of coffee and the way the liquid always feels so thicker than the water.
“Everything has to come together to say,” This is good coffee, “said Jia.” A drop of chemicals in your language will feel different. “
The group now investigates whether the slight vibrations in the tongue may be able to help simulate the texture of the food. They are also curious if the perfumes could be used to help complete the sensory image. And they believe they could be able to get the tiny pumps to be a little more miniature.
Ideally, you should not shake any such device on your rim. One day, perhaps the whole case may be quite elegant – a key or a pendant, transmitting flavors from afar.
