e-Taste sprays virtual food flavors directly into your mouth.

Virtual reality excels at engaging sight and sound, while developers continue making progress with touch. Even smell is beginning to play a role—for better or worse. That leaves one final sense: taste. Whether or not people truly want to experience flavors in virtual worlds, a new device is now tackling this uncharted territory.

Taste is highly personal—not just because it involves putting something in your mouth, but also because it varies dramatically from person to person and even bite to bite. What starts as a delightful flavor in the first mouthful can become overwhelming by the end of a meal.

Recreating the complex chemistry between food and the tongue digitally presents a major challenge. However, researchers at Ohio State University are taking a bold new approach with a device called e-Taste. Instead of relying on electrical or thermal stimulation—previous methods that attempted to trick the brain into tasting different flavors—this device pumps actual flavored chemicals directly into the mouth.

e-Taste Device Breaks Down Flavors into Chemical Components for Realistic Tasting Experience

The process begins by breaking down the five basic tastes into their respective chemical components. These include glucose for sweetness, salt for saltiness, citric acid for sourness, magnesium chloride for bitterness, and glutamate for umami. The e-Taste device houses these chemicals in separate capsules, releasing them in precise combinations and concentrations to mimic different foods. For instance, fruit juice might consist of two parts sweet and three parts sour, while roast chicken could blend two parts umami with one part salty.

When a virtual meal is triggered, e-Taste mixes the appropriate formula and delivers a few drops directly onto the tongue. The researchers even demonstrated that flavors could be released remotely through an online connection—a breakthrough with both exciting and potentially unsettling implications.

Early tests have yielded mixed results. Participants attempted to identify five different foods based solely on taste. While they successfully recognized virtual lemonade and cake, they struggled to distinguish between fried egg, fish soup, and coffee.

Despite these challenges, the concept holds promise. The research team plans to expand e-Taste with additional chemical compounds for more realistic flavor experiences. One day, users might even be able to sample the umami-rich mushrooms that Mario has been munching on for decades.

Read Original Article: New Atlas

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