Virtual Taste and Smell Technologies for Multisensory Internet and Virtual Reality

To pursue the next stage of the internet, humans should not only communicate emotions with visual, audio, and tactile stimuli but also with taste (gustation). Humans will want to share these stimuli collectively as an experience digitally, like they currently do with the visual and audio media on the internet.Wewant to propose the idea of gustation creating and experiencing digital representation of taste sensation. However, a new methodology is first needed to digitally stimulate the sense of taste to enable internet communication of the sense. We propose an electrical tongue stimulation device, which the user places in their mouth to produce taste sensations. This technique operates by inducing weak electric signals by changing frequency and Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) produced by the circuitry. Several experiments were carried out to evaluate this approach of digitizing taste sensations. Results from experiments show a new user experience through digital taste stimuli.