During the pandemic, Tokyo's lively Mejji University campus stood still. My students were restricted to their homes, appearing only as small figures on my screen during Zoom lectures on human-computer interaction. I spent the days in my lab, looking for ways to pass the time.
On a particularly bland day in 2020, I was recalling about how, before the pandemic, Tokyo used to be packed with people who had flown across the world to enjoy the exciting food scene. But now restaurants were empty and people longed for foods they once relished. I missed drinking wine in a bar, watching others enjoying their evenings. I wondered how I could contribute during these trying times. That's when an idea struck: why not create a device to bring the flavor of the world into people's homes?
In Japan, companies use taste sensors to monitor the quality of products. These devices measure the strength of the five basic tastes — salty, sweet, sour, bitter, umami — and assign each a value. It dawned on me that if taste could be quantified, perhaps it could also be recreated. I dissolved foods such as pizza and fries, measured how they rated, then made 10 liquid samples that each represented a taste. When copying the taste of food, it's like following a recipe; I combined the 10 liquid samples to reflect the taste sensor's measurements of the dissolved dish.
Taste the TV (TTTV), released in 2021, looks like a television screen — but you can lick it. Once the viewer selects a dish from the screen menu, an image of the food will appear, and above the screen a device containing my liquid flavor samples will spray in a combination that creates the taste of the chosen food. The spray then rolls films over the screen, and they can enjoy the taste of pizza without even biting into a slice.
My invention was received pretty well worldwide. My students and I would be interested in finding how else to challenge traditional ways of enjoying media, and we knew we wanted to expand on TTTV.
