Flavor is often a pleasurable sensory perception we experience daily while eating and drinking. However, the sensation of flavor is rarely considered in the age of digital communication mainly due to the unavailability of flavors as a digitally controllable media. This paper introduces a digital instrument (Digital Flavor Synthesizing device), which actuates taste (electrical and thermal stimulation) and smell sensations (controlled scent emitting) together to simulate different flavors digitally. A preliminary user experiment is conducted to study the effectiveness of this method with predefined five different flavor stimuli. Experimental results show that the users were effectively able to identify different flavors such as minty, spicy, and lemony. Moreover, we outline several challenges ahead along with future possibilities of this technology. In summary, our work demonstrates a novel controllable instrument for flavor simulation, which will be valuable in multimodal interactive systems for rendering virtual flavors digitally.

In recent years, digital media technologies expand horizons into non-traditional sensory modalities, for instance, the sense of taste. This demonstration presents `taste+,' which digitally improves the taste sensations of food and beverages without additional flavoring ingredients. It primarily utilizes weak and controlled electrical pulses on the human tongue to enhance sourness, saltiness, and bitterness of food or beverages. Taste+ consists of two prototype utensils, a bottle and a spoon. Both utensils have embedded electronic control modules to achieve enhanced taste sensations. These modules apply controlled electrical pulses on the tongue through silver electrodes attached to the mouth pieces. Furthermore, different superimposed colors symbolize distinct taste sensations, lemon green represents sour, ocean blue is salty, red for red wine bitter. The initial experimental results suggested that sourness and saltiness are the main sensations that could be evoked while bitterness has comparatively mild responses. Furthermore, we also observed several mixed sensations such as salty-sour together.

In this paper, we describe an interactive drinking platform, FunRasa, which digitally expands one's drinking experience. The system uses two methods: electrical stimulation on user's tongue and superimpose virtual color onto the actual drink, to expand the taste sensations of the drink. The system consists of a glass cup, an electronic platform with RGB LEDs, and a specially designed straw interface with two silver electrodes. When a user uses the straw, his tongue touches the silver electrodes (both lower and upper surfaces of the tip of the tongue) and is thus electrically stimulated when drinking. The user has the freedom to change the virtual color of the drink along with the magnitude of the current using two mechanical dials. Furthermore, we present several initial discussions on the user experience through a workshop that we conducted and several future usage scenarios of this technology.