This Is How That "TV You Can Taste" Actually Works

Sometime around Christmas, one of your family members probably mentioned that they saw a TV with a screen that lets you taste what is in the video. It is exactly the kind of device that gets writers like me all hot and bothered, because we know it will capture your curiosity as you speed scroll through Twitter. But most people just saw the headlines and didn't bother to learn how this crazy taste-able TV actually works, so I thought I'd take a moment to explain it to you.

The first thing you should know is that you aren't expected to lick the same screen that was just tongued by a gaggle of other people. The screen itself, which is a small and completely mundane LCD, sits below a thin transparent film. That film comes off of a roller, over the top of the LCD's surface, and onto another output roller (where it will, presumably, be stored until disposal). Between licks, the rollers spin to advance fresh film onto the screen.

That roller system is also key to how the system dispenses flavors for you to taste. Before the film slides in front of the LCD, it sits in a chamber. In that chamber, there are a handful of aerosolized flavors. Those are "five basic tastes" (plus a few extras, apparently) which the machine can combine to create the full spectrum of flavor — theoretically, at least. It's similar how the LCD itself can produce the full visible color spectrum using just red, blue, and green subpixels. In reality, I have my doubts that these flavor sprays can actually create convincing approximations of real foods.

After spraying flavor onto the film, the machine feeds it into place over the LCD, where the viewer can give it a big ol' lick. The idea is for the flavor to match whatever is onscreen, but they must program the flavor profiles ahead of time. It would be interesting to see an AI added to this machine to identify onscreen foods, so the machine can automatically generate the corresponding flavors.

But for now, as you likely already predicted, this is little more than a gimmick. Despite what you may have heard from your Aunt over the holidays, you won't be licking the TV in the family living room any time soon.