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Scientists have created an electric lollipop that can release “adjustable” flavors to make virtual reality an even more immersive experience. This means that soon you may be able to not only see and hear what is on a movie, TV, or video game screen, you can taste it too.
In a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at City University of Hong Kong explain their “concept of intelligent, portable lollipop-shaped gustation interfaces based on arrays of taste generators for gustatory VR applications.”
For those unfamiliar, they explain, “Gustation is one of the five innate sensations for humans, distinguishing from vision, auditory, tactile, and olfaction, as which is a close and chemically induced sense.” Got all that? It’s a super fancy way of saying “taste.”
The lollipops the scientists have come up with for this enhanced virtual reality experience can currently only produce nine flavors: salt, sugar, citric acid (sour), passion fruit, green tea, cherry, milk, durian, and grapefruit.
“Despite the fact that a handful of gustation display technologies have been developed, the new technologies still pose significant challenges in miniaturization of the overall size for portability, enriching taste options within a limited working area, supporting natural human–device interaction, and achieving precisely controlled taste feedback,” the scientists wrote in their research paper.
Inside their lollipop, the various flavors are contained in the device using edible chemicals trapped in hydrogels. When they hydrogels are stimulated by an electric current, whatever voltage is sent correlates to a certain taste and pushes it out of the device on to the tongue. The stronger the voltage that is sent through the device, the stronger the taste.
The lollipop device also contains a seven channel odor generator to enhance the virtual reality sensory experience even further.
The researchers believe that such a device will have many applications. It could be used for medical gustation assessment (i.e. testing someone’s sense of taste), remote shopping (allowing customers to taste food before buying), and, of course, mixed reality.
Currently, their prototype lollipop device will work for about an hour before the hydrogels need replacing. They are investigating ways to make it last longer, as well as ways to add even more flavors.