e-button: Virtual worlds get a taste
What does a cake or fish soup taste like in a computer game? The e-Taste system is designed to artificially recreate tastes.
Woman with VR glasses in the kitchen: five substances, five basic tastes
(Image: LightField Studios/Shutterstock)
VR glasses promise immersion in computer-generated worlds. You can look around and move around in them. But something is missing in terms of sensory perception. A system developed in the USA aims to enable virtual tasting.
The system, called e-Taste, was developed at Ohio State University. It consists of an electromagnetic pump that transports a mixture of several substances into the mouth of the test person, where it creates a taste sensation.
The five substances from which the flavors are mixed are glucose, citric acid, sodium chloride, magnesium chloride and glutamate. They represent the five basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami.
On its way into the mouth, the mixture is pressed through a layer of gel. The length of time the liquid interacts with the gel determines how intense the taste is. "Based on the digital instructions, you can also release one or more different flavors at the same time so that they can evoke different sensations," said project manager Jinghua Li.
Test subjects should recognize tastes
Taste sensations are difficult to reproduce, as Li's team found out. Nevertheless, the e-button system can produce tastes relatively well. In tests, the test subjects were able to distinguish between different intensities of a sour taste with an accuracy of around 70 percent. In other experiments, the test subjects were asked to recognize whether five simulated tastes were lemonade, cake, fried egg, fish soup or coffee.
The idea behind e-Taste is to create a better gaming experience. However, the system could also help people with disabilities, for example if they have lost their sense of taste due to an injury or long Covid. Ultimately, the scientists hope to gain insights into how the brain processes sensory signals from the mouth.
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"The chemical dimension is relatively underrepresented in the current VR and AR field, especially when it comes to smell and taste," said Li. This gap needs to be filled, he said, and e-Taste should contribute to this. Li's team describes its development in the journal Science Advances.
(wpl)
