Miniaturized, portable gustation interfaces for VR/AR/MR

Gustation is one of the five innate sensations for humans, distinguishing from vision, auditory, tactile, and olfaction, as which is a close and chemically induced sense. Despite the fact that a handful of gustation display technologies have been developed, the new technologies still pose significant challenges in miniaturization of the overall size for portability, enriching taste options within a limited working area, supporting natural human-device interaction, and achieving precisely controlled taste feedback. To address these issues, here, we report a set of intelligent and portable lollipop-shaped taste interfacing systems covering from 2 to 9 different taste options for establishing an adjustable taste platform in virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) environments. Tasteful and food-grade chemicals embedded agarose hydrogels serve as taste sources based on iontophoresis operation principle, with an adjustable feedback intensity and independent operation time by tuning the voltage input. To achieve portability and user-friendly operation, the devices are miniaturized into a gustation interface with 9-channel taste generators in the dimension of 8 cm × 3 cm × 1 cm. To realize both gustation and olfaction feedbacks in Metaverse, an olfaction interface based on 7-channel odor generators is also introduced into the gustation interface system. As a result, the demonstrations of our gustation interface systems in intelligent medical gustation assessment, remote shopping, and mixed reality have proven their advances and great progress in various potential application areas, ranging from human-machine interfaces, to biomedical science, and to entertainment.

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Publication Details

Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Published
2024-11-25
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2412116121
Citations
11
Primary Topic
Tactile and Sensory Interactions
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
3.77

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article

Miniaturized, portable gustation interfaces for VR/AR/MR

Xinge Yu, Takao Someya, Chun Ki Yiu, Zhenyu Liu et al.
11 citations
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Tactile and Sensory Interactions
3.77
article

Miniaturized, portable gustation interfaces for VR/AR/MR

Xinge Yu, Takao Someya, Chun Ki Yiu, Zhenyu Liu, Tomoyuki Yokota, Mengge Wu, Woo‐Young Park, Xingcan Huang, Kening Zhu, Hongting Chen, Shengxin Jia, Yao Chen, Yuyu Gao, Yuhang Li, Yiming Liu, Pengcheng Wu, Zhao Zhao, Hehua Zhang
article en
11 citations

Abstract

Gustation is one of the five innate sensations for humans, distinguishing from vision, auditory, tactile, and olfaction, as which is a close and chemically induced sense. Despite the fact that a handful of gustation display technologies have been developed, the new technologies still pose significant challenges in miniaturization of the overall size for portability, enriching taste options within a limited working area, supporting natural human-device interaction, and achieving precisely controlled taste feedback. To address these issues, here, we report a set of intelligent and portable lollipop-shaped taste interfacing systems covering from 2 to 9 different taste options for establishing an adjustable taste platform in virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) environments. Tasteful and food-grade chemicals embedded agarose hydrogels serve as taste sources based on iontophoresis operation principle, with an adjustable feedback intensity and independent operation time by tuning the voltage input. To achieve portability and user-friendly operation, the devices are miniaturized into a gustation interface with 9-channel taste generators in the dimension of 8 cm × 3 cm × 1 cm. To realize both gustation and olfaction feedbacks in Metaverse, an olfaction interface based on 7-channel odor generators is also introduced into the gustation interface system. As a result, the demonstrations of our gustation interface systems in intelligent medical gustation assessment, remote shopping, and mixed reality have proven their advances and great progress in various potential application areas, ranging from human-machine interfaces, to biomedical science, and to entertainment.

Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesVol. 121(49)
Tokyo University of Information Sciences (JP), Ningbo University of Technology (CN), City University of Hong Kong (HK), Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HK), RIKEN (JP), China Special Equipment Inspection and Research Institute (CN), RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (JP), Liaoning Academy of Materials, The University of Tokyo (JP), Beihang University (CN)
City University of Hong Kong, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Science, Technology and Innovation Commission of Shenzhen Municipality, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, National Natural Science Foundation of China-Guangdong Joint Fund, Overseas Expertise Introduction Center for Discipline Innovation of Food Nutrition and Human Health (111 Center)
Openalex Percentile: Top 6%
Tactile and Sensory Interactions
3.77
DOIOpen Access PDFOpenAlex
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