Multimodal Digital Taste Experience with D'Licious Vessel

Increasingly, people are replacing soft drinks with natural fruit juices, since soft drinks usually contain excessive sugar and little nutrition. This paper introduces a multimodal digital taste control system ‘D’Licious Vessel’ and the respective prototypes. The goal is to provide a digital solution to health concerns regarding overuse of sugar in our daily drinks by decreasing the natural sourness. The system applies gentle electrical signals to a person’s tongue to trigger different taste sensations and improve the taste of drinks digitally without involving consumption of actual chemicals. We conducted user studies in a public setting to collect the experimental data and to find the system’s effectiveness in improving the taste of lemon juice. During the study, participants were provided with lemon juice and asked to compare the taste difference while drinking with different settings of the taste stimulation prototype. Their opinions for different prototype designs are recorded and discussed.