
Meiji University Develop Taste Display That Can Recreate Nearly Every Flavor - adunk
https://www.hackster.io/news/meiji-university-engineers-develop-taste-display-that-can-recreate-nearly-every-flavor-f1120994954b
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Scaevolus
Note that this is just for taste, not smell. You're not going to lick it and
taste chocolate or bread.

Having a neutral source of the 5 tastes is helpful for cooking. Sugar, salt,
citric acid, and mono sodium glutamate cover the "desirable" flavors well--
bitterness is best delivered by some ingredient that also has interesting
smells, like cocoa powder or okra.

There are other compounds that are close to tastes, but don't operate using
tastebuds or olfaction. Pungent and cooling sensations from chili peppers and
mint are well know, and there are several other chemicals that have unique
sensations on the tongue:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste#Further_sensations_and_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste#Further_sensations_and_transmission)

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cmehdy
This is pretty interesting for research in multi-modal interfaces. There's a
lot of stuff already done with visual, auditory and haptic feedbacks, but not
so much with smells and taste because there is no equivalent to screens &
speakers for those senses yet.

Coincidentally (or not?), chemoperception (taste and smell) seems to be the
oldest mechanisms developed for perception. There could be many mechanisms
anchored within ourselves that we haven't been able to grasp and map out since
we have had limited ways to do research on them. Links between smell and
memory, for example. Or what possibilities arise from the combination of 350
different known types of smell cells (and a total of 50 million cells in a
human nose IIRC). The link between smell and taste is also quite interesting,
so I hope this gets to be studied better in the future.

I might be biased by past experience in Japan, but it seems like all the
creative research in these fields emerges more frequently from Japan than
anywhere else. Are there equivalent programs in the US or Europe?

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JoeAltmaier
But can they do a hot chili pepper? I think not.

