Associate Professor [Homei Miyashita] from Meiji University’s School of Science and Technology in Tokyo has developed a new technology for reproducing taste on a television or monitor, a system called Taste the TV (TTTV). The team of researchers used taste sensors to sample a variety of foods, and came up with a palette of 10 different aerosol flavors which can be combined in various ratios. The taste is generated in a staging area at the top of the screen onto a thin plastic film, which is then scrolled down into position.
Possible applications shown in the video below the break include cooking programs, restaurant menus, and wine tasting events. We’re not quite sure how popular this would be to consumers. Tele-tasting a cooking show with friends would be inconvenient, if not unsanitary. We’re also not aware that current video interface protocols such as HDMI or ATSC include any provisions for senses other than sight and sound. If you have access to scholarly journals, [Prof Miyashita] research paper on TTTV is available in the 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.
We’ve written about a couple of taste-generating projects before, see here and here.
So now we will get to taste all of the crappy programs.
Yecch!
Bertie Botts has entered the chatroom…
Can’t help thinking of:
SCTV Count Floyd Monster Chiller Horror Theater Smellorama 3D
> We’re also not aware that current video interface protocols such as HDMI or ATSC include any provisions for senses other than sight and sound.
HDMI 6.2 might support it, but the HDMI Licensing Authority, having ditched every standard made prior will likely insist on every new HDMI-capable device to be labelled HDMI 6.2 and you’ll have to trawl the alphabet soup to know if your shiny new television is TTTV-compliant.
Timely!
B^)
Lip smacking perfect for the pandemic, am I right? But what about kooties? Maybe make it operate by telepathy so there’s no contact? Anyone have Elon Musk’s phone number?
Maybe it will sample taste buds and brainwaves like the Drinks machine on the Heart of Gold.
That way we can all end up tasting a liquid which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. (yuck)
Reminds me of an attempt to make television smell via iSmell technology maybe 20 years ago. Never got past prototype stage,
Smell-a-vision
i bet in the UK they would be calling it as “smelly”
I am both excited and appalled at the thought of this technology applied to internet pornography.
Rule 34.
But will it need to store cookies?
Previously, only having read the headline “A TV that you can lick”, I exclaimed to the other half: you can lick anything if you’re brave enough.
Just be careful on nature programmes, some of those animals aren’t good to lick.
There’s a place in the video stream for this information to live. Have the appliance that makes the flavoring look at a segment of the screen where a barcode would send it to the website for taste generating data and voila.
Of course hacking it so everything tastes like Crap would be a fun thing to do.
Ahh, but what does crap actually taste like?
I could surmise from its smell, but I’ve never actually tasted it so I couldn’t be certain that what I was tasting indeed tasted like genuine crap.
… and taste is subjective anyway, so you might suddenly start a whole new food craze.