Will digital tastes bring virtual worlds to life?

You’re minding your own business, surfing the web idly, when an advert pops up for your local fast-food establishment. The pictured burger certainly looks delectable, but it’s the smell wafting from your laptop that entices you to lick your display for a taste – and when you do, it’s delicious greasy goodness (without the calories). The future of lunch may just be digital.

Researchers in Japan are the latest to demonstrate this idea. Homei Miyashita, a professor at Meiji University, Tokyo, demonstrated a prototype of what he calls “Taste the TV”, developed in a lab where students spend their time creating digital taste devices. The TV uses combinations of ten canisters to create flavours that are sprayed onto a removable film on the display, where they can be licked by watchers, according to a Reuters report, with one student successfully asking the system to recreate the taste of chocolate during the demonstration.

“The goal is to make it possible for people to have the experience of something like eating at a restaurant on the other side of the world, even while staying at home,” Miyashita said. Normally, we chew our food rather than lick it from plastic screens, but there are potential uses