Gustatory interface: the challenges of ‘how’ to stimulate the sense of taste

Abstract

Gustatory interfaces have gained popularity in the field of humancomputer interaction, especially in the context of augmenting gaming and virtual reality experiences, but also in the context of food interaction design enabling the creation of new eating experiences. In this paper, we first review prior works on gustatory interfaces and particularly discuss them based on the use of either a chemical, electrical and/or thermal stimulation approach. We then present two concepts for gustatory interfaces that represent a more traditional delivery approach (using a mouthpiece) versus a novel approach that is based on principles of acoustic levitation (contactless delivery). We discuss the design opportunities around those two concepts in particular to overcome challenges of "how" to stimulate the sense of taste.

Taste Your Emotions

“…In addition, when both emotional valence and arousal are considered, tastes can be used to communicate both high arousal and negative valence emotional responses. These findings suggest interesting potential for HCI research, where the exploration of taste as resource for design has focused mostly on taste types [26,47,50,51] and less on taste intensity, nor on the relation between taste type and intensity with user experience [13,31]. Future work should further explore the relationship between taste intensity and user experience, possibly by leveraging flavor experience and other multisensory stimuli [34].…”

“…The potential use of taste for research arises through the embodied nature of taste experience and its potential to trigger associated affective and temporal experiences [31]. Initial work in HCI [28,47] and findings from psychology [20,35,49,54] show specific relationships between basic tastes and emotions, explored mostly in lab-based contexts. Thus, we know little about how these relationships or the mapping between tastes and emotions, extend to a real-life context.…”

“…The lollipop-controller delivers sour or sweet taste stimuli in response to events within gameplay, with the sour taste reinforcing negative events, and the sweet taste, positive ones. Using all 5 basic tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami, TasteBud [47] pumps liquid taste stimuli into a mouthpiece responding to outcomes in a game.…”

Space Food Experiences: Designing Passenger's Eating Experiences for Future Space Travel Scenarios

“…More recently, technological advancements in acoustic levitation have led to the design of a novel taste-delivery technology that transports and manipulates food morsels (solid and liquid food) in midair (Vi et al, 2017a). All these efforts are directed toward a new generation of interface design based on taste to augment human-computer interactions (e.g., Vi et al, 2017bVi et al, , 2018Velasco et al, 2018) but also help create new food and eating experiences.…”

"Like Popcorn"

“…Yet, interest in multisensory HCI is steadily growing, with efforts to go beyond graphics and audio and tactile feedback and to bring smell and taste to the forefront of human-computer interaction (e.g. [23,28,74,78,86]). This is critical because augmenting interactive technologies with more sophisticated multisensory capabilities captures the richness of human experience and thus can lead to better designs of interactive technology.…”