In the future, drinks can be "downloaded" via the Internet

Recently, researchers from the National University of Singapore and the Georgia Institute of Technology presented a method for creating "virtual lemonade." They are sure that the taste of different drinks can be transmitted via the Internet and downloaded, and in the future you can even create your own “virtual bar” in the “cloud”.

H2O + RGB + pH = Lemonade

While the technology is being tested on lemonade. For example, they want to treat you with a glass of soft drink, but the kindhearted person is in another city or even on another continent. How to be? He drops a special sensor with an RGB color sensor and a pH acidity sensor into a glass of lemonade. This information via the Internet gets into your computer and is downloaded via Bluetooth with a special toggle switch in the form of a glass of water. A moment - and you already feel a refreshing lemon taste.

The secret is that instead of lemonade you drink plain water. The feeling of "lemonade taste" is given to you by silver electrodes on the rim of the glass, which slightly beat you with impulses at 800 Hz, irritating the taste buds. And the LED device at the bottom of the toggle switch arranges a mini-light show, scattering the desired color through the water.

These impressions will also be superimposed on the expectation of taste at the sight of a glass of lemonade, which researchers call the “pretaste”. It is based on dizziness and temperature. Having taken a sip, you add to these expectations already real taste sensations (in this case acidity).

Virtual bar

During the experiment, the researchers gave a try to 12 different real and virtual lemonades to 13 participants. The team painted real lemonades in green, muddy and yellow with tasteless food colors, and virtual ones with LEDs.

Photo: shiennyk.com

Participants said that real lemonades are tastier than virtual ones. But in general, there was no statistically significant difference in their perception of different tastes, so scientists are optimistic about the possibility of teleporting lemonade.

The team hopes this research will be the first step and lead, for example, to the expansion of virtual taste technologies for multi-sensory interactions. In particular, researchers want to try transmitting strong drinks via the Internet, and are also considering the possibility of exchanging digital signatures of drinks stored in a virtual cloud.