Straight Out Of Willy Wonka’s Mind: Electric Gels Take On Any Flavor When Licked

Late last year, Japanese researcher Homei Miyashita created the lickable television screen, letting you really enhance that cooking show-watching experience. Just a couple of months later, Miyashita has another innovation that will now allow users to taste different things using electrified gels. 

The Norimaki Synthesizer, looking like an unsuspecting tube of unsuspecting contents from afar, contains five gels—and flavors—that will purportedly be able to simulate any flavor that comes from the five basic tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami. 

“Like an optical display that uses lights of three basic colors to produce arbitrary colors, this display can synthesize and distribute arbitrary tastes together with the data acquired by taste sensors,” Miyashita writes in a paper for Meiji University, where he is a researcher.

These flavors are created by dissolving the electrolytes in small amounts of water to develop a concentrated taste. These are glycine, sodium chloride, magnesium chloride, citric acid, and glutamic sodium. 

Heated agar is used in the gels to retain their shape in the tube. Food coloring is also used, but this is more to tell the flavors apart than anything.

Dezeen reports that the tubes of gel also include platinum wire electrodes. When charged with electricity, the electrolyte-infused gels will provide tastes to the user, who places the device and its gels straight onto their tongue. 

The intensity of the flavor can be controlled via the intensity of the electric current, too. When there is no current, users will taste all five things at once.

“The device is wrapped in copper foil, and also wrapped in dried seaweed in this case,” Miyashita explains. “Presenting taste of salty and sour with seaweed scent causes illusion of actually eating sushi.” 

Hence the device’s name: “norimaki” means “sushi wrapped in dried seaweed” in Japanese. 

There are limitations, though. He did explain to Dezeen that the fragrance of the “food” replicated by the gels can’t be evoked in the same way, nor can pungent spicy food be made. But all things considered, evoking most of the world’s tastes through a device that looks like sushi is pretty impressive.

[via Dezeen and Futurism, images via Homei Miyashita for Meiji University]