Imagine that you discuss video with a distant friend who has lunch, and your boyfriend’s sandwich is delicious. What if you could ask your friend to dive a sensor in the meal and give you a taste?
Remote snacking has come closer to virtual reality. In A newspaper Friday in the journal Science advanceYizhen Jia, a student graduated in materials in Ohio State University, his advisor Jinghua Li and their colleagues report that they have helped volunteers to taste the flavors intended to represent distant samples of coffee, lemonade, fried eggs, cake and fish soup.
In an interview, Mr. Jia discussed an image of him to model a version of a device that he and his colleagues have built, which relies on microfluidic. Single with your lip are what the five or six sauce packs that you would add to instant ramen look like. The packages feed on a small tube slipped into his mouth. When the miniature pumps in the packages receive a signal from a sensor dipped in a far liquid, they get to work. In this case, the researchers’ objective was to accurately transmit the taste of a glass of lemonade.
In a more complex version of the configuration, the packets containing a variety of substances such as salt water, citric acid and glucose are arranged in semicircle on a table, allowing a person at the end of the tube to receive other tastes.
Why, you might ask, would you like to taste someone else’s fish soup? Mr. Jia stresses that it is common to be able to see and hear what is going on. Why not be able to taste it? Or maybe you would like to taste recipes in a kitchen book before committing to making them. Perhaps one day there could be a button on the online grocery services so that you can practically test the tests of different spicy sauces before buying them.
Currently, these scenarios may seem a little fanciful and the device, to say it slightly, a little heavy. The researchers behind the new document, however, are not the only ones to work on devices that could allow us to taste and feel things that are not in our immediate vicinity.
“There are people who try to do it with direct electrical stimulation on your language,” said Jia. “There are people who try to use other ways to deliver chemicals. We use a water pump. »»
In this article, the team’s pump sent various concentrations of lemonade aromas to volunteers. They have shown that study participants could reliably assess the samples by bitterness. Whether the researchers dipped a lemonade sensor to generate the flavor, or simply used a recipe to mix chemicals transmitted by the pump, the effects were similar.
When volunteers received the flavors of coffee, dish eggs, cake, lemonade and fish soup generated by chemical recipes, they were able to correctly identify the five tastes they had been fed most of the time. With a greater variety of chemicals and more recipes, more foods could be simulated, suggest researchers.
It is however more delicate than it seems: not all tastes are just as easy to simulate. When you work with tiny amounts of liquid, it can be difficult to nail the concentrations of taste molecules so that a subject has an experience similar to the real thing. The smell and texture of food and drinks are also linked to the experience of taste. Think of the aroma of coffee and how the liquid always feels as much thicker as water.
“Everything must bring you together to say:” It’s a good coffee “,” said Jia. “A drop of chemicals on your tongue will feel different.”
The team now examines if low language vibrations could be able to help simulate food texture. They are also curious to know if the perfumes could be used to complete the sensory image. And they think they could be able to ensure that the miniature pumps are a little more miniature.
Ideally, you would not have to hang such a device from your lip. One day, maybe the whole case could be quite delicate – a medallion or a pendant and transmit tastes from afar.