What if you can taste food from 1,000 miles away?

Imagine that you are video chat with a distant friend who is having lunch, and your sail’s sandwich looks delicious. What if you can ask your friend to sink the sensor in food, and give you a taste?

The remote snacking is slightly closer to the virtual reality. In A paper on Friday in Journal Science AdvanceA graduate student at Material Engineering at Ohio State University, Yizen Jia, her advisor Jinghua Lee and her colleagues report that she helped volunteers taste taste taste to represent coffee, lemonade, fried eggs, cakes and fish soup samples.

In an interview, Mr. Jia discussed a picture of modeling a version of a tool by him and his colleagues, which depends on it. MicrofluidicsHanging from her lips looks like five or six sauce packets that you will immediately add to the remonet. The packets in a small tube slipped into her mouth. When the short pump in the packet receives a signal immersed in a fluid from a sensor, they work. In this case, researchers aims to properly transmit the taste of a glass of lemonade.

In a more complex version of the setup, a variety of substances such as salt water, citric acid, and glucose packets are placed in a semicircular on a table, allowing a person to achieve other tastes at the end of the tube.

Why, you can ask, would you like to taste someone else’s fish soup? Mr. Zia explains that it is common to be able to see and hear what is going on away. Why not be able to taste it? Or maybe you want to taste the dishes in the cookbook before you are committed to make them. Maybe someday there can be a button on online grocery purchasing services so that you can test different hot sauces before purchasing them.

Right now, these landscapes can look slightly eccentric and device, lightly, to put a garbage cumbersome. Researchers behind the new paper, however, are not only working on equipment that can allow us to taste and smell the things that are not in our immediate surrounding area.

“People are trying to do it with direct electrical stimulation on their tongue,” Mr. Jia said. “There are people trying to use other methods to distribute chemicals. We are using a water pump. ,

In this letter, the team’s pump sent various concentrations of lemonade taste to volunteers. He demonstrated that the participants of the study could firmly rate samples from sourness. Whether researchers drowned a sensor in lemonade to generate taste, or simply used a recipe to merge the chemicals transmitted by the pump, the effects were the same.

When volunteers were sent to the tastes of coffee, fried eggs, cakes, lemonade and fish soup generated through chemical dishes, they were able to correctly identify what time they were fed. With various types of chemicals and more dishes, more foods can be imitated, the researchers suggested.

It seems compared to it seems compared to, however: not all tastes are equally easy to simulate. When you are working with small amounts of fluids, it can be difficult to nail the concentrations of taste molecules so that a subject has the same experience as a real thing. The smell and texture of food and beverage is associated with the experience of taste. Think about the aroma of coffee and the way liquid water is sometimes thicker than water.

“Everything has to come together to say you,” this is a good coffee, “said Mr. Jia. “A drop of chemicals on your tongue is going to feel different.”

The team is now investigating whether the unconscious vibrations on the tongue can help simulate the texture of foods. They are also curious as to whether the Scents can be used to help to score a sensory picture. And they feel that they may be able to get short pumps to be slightly more short.

Ideally, you do not have to hang any such device from your lips. Someday, perhaps, the whole matter can be quite salty – a locket or a pendant, transmitted from a distant taste.