Japanese technology
What’s next? NETLICKS?
New system makes the TV an integral part of your TV dinner.
Professor Homei Miyashita of Tokyo’s Meiji University claims to have come up with a way to make the TV an integral part of your TV dinner. His Taste-the-TV (TTTV) system has a lickable TV screen that allows people to taste images displayed on it.
The TTTV reportedly uses a carousel of ten flavor canisters that spray combinations of different flavoring agents onto a “hygienic film” to reproduce particular flavors. The film is then rolled across the TV screen for the viewer/taster to lick.
According to Miyashita:
“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 says his ultimate goal is to develop a wide range of “taste content” for his invention, so people can stay in touch with the outside world even when they are being forced to stay at home for some reason.
Miyashita dreams of creating an online platform from which people can download flavors from around the world for personal enjoyment as easily as they download music these days. Not only that, he claims to be in talks with companies that want to license his spray technology to develop a device that can spray pizza, chocolate, and other flavors onto slices of toast.
Innovation?
Well… Maybe… I guess…
When I first saw this news, I was pretty puzzled as to how this notion originated. But the more I thought about it, the more that targeting the taste buds started to make perfect sense.
The sense of taste… the final uncharted frontier of entertainment.
As we all know, the entertainment industry has long relied mostly on stimulating our senses of sight and sound.
Back in the 1960s, the film industry experimented with stimulation of the olfactory sense with systems named “Screen-Scent,” “Smell-O-Vision,” and “AromaRama.”
More recently, virtual reality systems have been created to give users sensations that make it feel like they are touching objects in virtual settings.
This leaves the sense of taste as the final uncharted frontier of the entertainment industry.
But in my mind, there are still a few unanswered questions. First of all, what happens to the “hygienic film” after it is licked and no longer hygienic?
As for spraying artificial flavors onto a piece of toast, doesn’t this mean your tasty treat in reality is nothing more than a carb-loaded piece of bread?
Admittedly, much of the technology we take for granted today was unimaginable a relatively short time ago. But based on the tepid reaction of a person who sampled a simulated chocolate flavor produced by the system at a recent demonstration, I strongly doubt that licking TV screens and spraying chemical flavors onto bread will be part of our daily lives anytime soon.
“It’s kind of like milk chocolate. It’s sweet like chocolate sauce.”
