The cookie of the future?

It turns out that you can work on the taste buds. Get the technology that will make you believe that a simple butter cookie you are eating is actually a special cookie in any flavor you choose. How It Works?

We are already used to people trying to work on us with the eyes, but is it possible to "work" on the tongue? Takeji Narumi, a doctoral student at the University of Tokyo in Japan, believes so. He and his team developed a technology called Meta-Cookie ("super cookie") that aims to convince us that a simple butter cookie that we are tasting is actually a chocolate, almond, or any other flavor of our choice. The super cookie was presented at the SIGGRAPH 2010 conference held in July in Los Angeles.

The technology is based on the well-known idea that the tasting experience is not carried out with the tongue alone but is significantly influenced by the senses of sight and smell. The taste cells in the tongue and palate are able to distinguish a limited number of tastes: sweet, bitter, sour, salty and "ummi" - the taste of glutamate, while what we perceive as the unique "taste" of food is largely determined by the "aroma", or his smell According to this logic, if a food item placed on a plate looks like a duck and smells like a duck, when we bite into it we will not notice that it is actually a turkey...

It just looks like a chocolate chip cookie

Nerumi and his colleagues built a system that changes the way the user perceives the appearance and aroma of a cookie that he tastes. They used augmented reality technology, which combines virtual items in the "real" world. In the system they developed, the user wears a special helmet and holds in his hand a simple butter cookie (sweet but with a "neutral" aroma) that has a unique shape burned into it. This shape allows a camera system to identify the cookie and track it.

Now comes the fun part. The user chooses the type of cookie he wants to taste - the options include, among other things, chocolate, lemon and cheese - and then the system goes into action. The user looks at the display mounted on the helmet and sees everything that is in front of him, but instead of seeing the cookie he is holding in his hand, he sees an image of a cookie in the flavor of his choice, which is "dressed" on top of the real cookie. The image adjusts itself every moment to the location of the real cookie, thus maintaining the illusion that the user is holding the selected cookie in his hand.

When the user brings the cookie closer to his mouth, the helmet starts to release substances with the selected scent: strawberry scent, chocolate scent, etc. The closer the user brings the cookie to his mouth, the stronger the smell that is released. When the user bites into the cookie, he should feel the flavor he chose due to the stimulation of his other senses.

The technology is indeed entertaining, but it is not yet clear what it will be used for, unless the scientists are able to come to Israel and try to market "Meta-Matzah" in preparation for Passover...