Electronic tongue could let you taste cake in virtual reality
Hydrogels with a taste are administered into the mouth via a small tubeShulin Chen
An electronic tongue that can replicate flavours like cake and fish soup could help recreate food in virtual reality, but can’t yet simulate other things that influence taste, such as smell.
Yizhen Jia at The Ohio State University and his colleagues have developed a system, called e-Taste, that can sample a food and work out how to partly recreate its flavour in someone’s mouth.
This involves using chemicals that correspond to the five basic tastes: sodium chloride for salty, citric acid for sour, glucose for sweet, magnesium chloride for bitter and glutamate for umami. “Those five flavours are already accounting for a very large spectrum of the food we have daily,” says Jia.
The sy...
