This Lickable Display Lets You Taste All The Food In The World

No matter how clean you think they are, you should never lick your electronic devices. However, you can lick this device invented by a researcher at Meiji University, Japan. It’s essentially a taste display with the ability to recreate any flavor as it triggers the 5 tastes on the tongue of a person.

In the past, many believed that there were different regions on the tongue to taste sweet, salty, bitter, and sour flavors, where the taste buds of a specific flavor are denser. Besides, we have known that a fifth flavor has its taste buds spread more evenly on the tongue, called umami, which plays an important role in a person’s enjoyment of food. This information is crucial to the new device, dubbed the Norimaki Synthesizer by its creator Homei Miyashita.

The device was inspired by the fact that our eyes can be easily tricked into seeing something that does not exist. The screen we use these days consists of microscopic pixels that are made up of blue, green, and red elements combining in different intensities to generate full-color images. Miyashita wondered whether he could use this approach to trick the tongue.

Scientists have tried to artificially simulate tastes on the tongue both with and without using food. However, previous attempts seemed to focus on a certain taste or improve just one flavor. Meanwhile, with the Norimaki Synthesizer, Miyashita uses five gels to trigger all the five tastes at the same time when they make contact with the tongue.

The gels are color-coded and made from agar, shaped like long tubes, using glutamic sodium to create savory umami, magnesium chloride to create the bitter flavor, sodium, chloride to create the salty flavor, citric acid to produce acidic, and glycine to generate the sweet flavor. When a user presses the tongue on the device, they will experience all the tastes simultaneously, but certain flavors are generated by mixing the tastes in specific intensities and amounts. For this to work, the researcher wraps the device in copper foil so when a user holds it in their hand and presses their tongue on it, it creates an electrical circuit through their body, triggering a technique called electrophoresis.

Electrophoresis is when molecules are moved in a gel when there’s an electric current, which lets them be categorized by the size of pores in the gel. In the device, though, the process just makes the ingredients in the tubes move away from the end that touches the tongue, decreasing the ability of the tongue to taste them. This subtractive process removes specific tastes to generate a certain flavor. When testing, the device allowed users to experience every flavor such as sushi, gummy candy without using actual food.

While the prototype is bulky, the device can be miniaturized to be carried around.

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