Watch enough food and travel videos on YouTube and you’ll start wishing that you were there yourself to taste and smell the food in person. While we’ve seen some attempts at making smell-o-vision, it seems that in the future, we might also be able to taste foods through our screen thanks to the Taste Display, or the Norimaki Synthesizer.
Developed by researcher Homei Miyashita, this is essentially a lickable display that can transmit the flavors of what you’re seeing on the screen to your tongue. While it might not necessarily be quite as satisfying compared to eating the actual thing, it could at the very least give you an idea of what you could expect.
This is based on the concept of tricking the eyes into seeing something that does not exist, and Miyashita wondered if that concept could be applied to the tongue. The Taste Display contains tubes of gels made from agar that is meant to stimulate our five different senses of taste: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami.
The mixture of the gel will vary depending on the food in question, so for example a food that is more sour will result in more of the gel designed to stimulate our sour taste buds to be excreted, and so on. Given that we haven’t actually tried it for ourselves, we have no idea how effective this device is, but it sounds rather interesting and could be something to look forward to in the future.
Filed in . Read more about Japan, Science and Social Hit. Source: gizmodo