Face Electrodes Let You Taste and Chew In Virtual Reality (newscientist.com)

walterbyrd quotes a report from New Scientist: Experiments with "virtual food" use electronics to emulate the taste and feel of the real thing, even when there's nothing in your mouth. This tech could add new sensory inputs to virtual reality or augment real-world dining experiences, especially for people with restricted diets or health issues that affect their ability to eat. Several projects have succeeded in tricking us into tasting things that aren't there. Nimesha Ranasinghe at the National University of Singapore has already experimented with a "digital lollipop" to emulate different tastes, and a spoon embedded with electrodes that amplify the salty, sour, or bitter flavor of the real food eaten off it. However, his experiments with electrical stimulation had less success simulating sweetness compared to the other tastes. But digitizing this taste could be particularly useful in, for example, helping people cut back on sugary food or drinks. So Ranasinghe and his colleague Ellen Yi-Luen Do started experimenting with thermal stimulation instead. Their new project, presented at the 2016 ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST) in Tokyo, uses changes in temperature to mimic the sensation of sweetness on the tongue. The user places the tip of their tongue on a square of thermoelectric elements that are rapidly heated or cooled, hijacking thermally sensitive neurons that normally contribute to the sensory code for taste. In an initial trial, it worked for about half of participants. Some also reported a sensation of spiciness when the device was warmer (around 35 degrees Celsius) and a minty taste when it was cooler (18 degrees Celsius). Ranasinghe and Do envisage such a system embedded in a glass or mug to make low-sugar drinks taste sweeter.

Comments

Hmm...

[EmeraldBot]

Diabetes can be caused by consuming too much sugar, but if you cut back on the amount but still preserve the same taste, you start treading down the very dangerous path of insulin resistance as well. Your body will stop making the proper amount of insulin for what it detects in taste because it's used to lack of sugar, and you'll wind up with diabetes all the same - it's only an effective way to allow somebody whose body already doesn't produce or absorb the proper amount of insulin to satisfy a sugar craving. However, this does have some great potential for MMO games and cooking websites and the like - while taste is arguably our least useful sense in such an environment, such a sensor might find a place for allowing people to preview recipes before they cook them or such.

Forgive me Jeebuz

[Ol Olsoc]

The first thing I thought of was simulating the various tastes the pr0n VR market might use.

Re:Forgive me Jeebuz

[Ol Olsoc]

My sense of smell is probably just shy of a bloodhound's, so food flavors are more varied for me than most I guess. For me smells have color and texture, too. People just don't understand when I say something smells brown and dusty.

Synesthesia - awesome! I also have an enhanced sense of smell, which brings up a pet theory of mine. I find that women smell really good, and men do not - to me. I'm not talking about perfume or unclean body odor, but an inherent smell to each sex. Women just smell good. And I find a relationship between the smell and who I find attractive. I have always suspected that people might be noticing a smell that doesn't quite reach their threshold of sensation, but react to it anyhow.

Which has always made me wonder about the idea of sexual orientation as inborn or a choice. I never chose to find the inherent smell of women attractive, but it tells me something about myself.

People taste things differently, too. I hate cilantro, but others seem to like it. It tastes like copper or soap to me. I wonder how this new VR eating will cover variances like that.

Ugh - the taste of Cilantro reminds me of getting an ivory soap bar stuck in my mouth as a punishment for being saucy as a kid.

Now one other thing about smell that is interesting. For all of the things I smell intensely, I can just barely smell bayberry. All of us have a few holes in our sense of smell. Like the smell of urine after eating asparagus. I love asparagus, but the smell when you hit the bathroom next? Yikes! Since some people reported they couldn't smell those effects, it was originally thought that they didn't produce the smell - as it turned out, it's just that some people can't smell it. The lucky bastards!

Chicken

[PPH]

Everything tastes like chicken.

Because there's a glitch in the matrix.