Hyderabad: 

These sensors are attuned to recognise molecules like glucose and glutamate— chemicals that represent the five basic tastes of sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. Once captured via an electrical signal, the data is wirelessly passed to a remote device for replication.

Virtual reality is the closest we can get to experiencing a digital environment as if it were real, courtesy of visual and auditory cues. Now, a new technology intends to push it further by incorporating a new sensory connection-- taste. The interface, dubbed e-Taste, uses a combination of sensors and wireless chemical dispensers to enable the remote perception of taste.

Researchers at The Ohio State University confirmed the device’s ability to digitally simulate a range of taste intensities, following field tests. Jinghua Li, co-author of the study (published in the journal Science Advances) and an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Ohio State calls the system a new venue to help people connect in virtual spaces in "never-before-seen ways".

How the taste-replication system works?

The system, inspired by Li's earlier biosensor work, consists of an actuator with two components-- a mouth interface and a small electromagnetic pump. This pump connects to a chemical liquid channel that vibrates when an electric charge passes through it, pushing the solution through a special gel layer into the subject's mouth. The longer the solution interacts with the gel layer, the intensity and strength of the taste can be adjusted.

Li mentioned that digital instructions allow for releasing one or multiple tastes at once, creating various sensations.

The challenges involved:

Li mentioned that taste and smell are closely related to human emotion and memory. Therefore, their sensor needs to learn to capture, control, and store all this information. Despite the difficulty involved in replicating similar taste sensations for most people, researchers found that in human trials, participants could distinguish between different sour intensities in the liquids generated by the system with about 70 per cent accuracy.

Taste is a subjective sense that can vary from moment to moment. This complex feeling results from two of the body's chemical sensing systems working together-- gustation (taste) and olfaction (smell), which ensure that what you eat is safe and nutritious.

Further tests of e-Taste’s ability to immerse players in a virtual food experience showed that remote tasting could be initiated from Ohio to California. Another experiment had subjects identify five food options, such as lemonade, cake, fried egg, fish soup, or coffee.

A step towards better VR experiences:

Beyond helping to build a better and more dynamic gaming experience, the study notes that the work could be useful in promoting accessibility and inclusivity in virtual spaces for individuals with disabilities, like those with traumatic brain injuries or Long Covid, which brought gustatory loss to mainstream attention.

According to Li, the e-Taste results open up new possibilities for VR experiences and provide scientists with a deeper understanding of how the brain processes sensory signals from the mouth. Their next step could involve further miniaturising the stem and improving its compatibility with different chemical compounds in food that produce taste sensations.

“The chemical dimension in the current VR and AR realm is relatively underrepresented, especially when we talk about olfaction and gustation. It's a gap that needs to be filled, and we’ve developed that with this next-generation system," Li said. “This concept is here and it is a good first step to becoming a small part of the metaverse."

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