Imagine that you are talking to a remote friend who is eating lunch, and your side’s sandwich looks delicious. What if you can ask your friend to sink a meal sensor and give you a taste?

Snacking in the distance has moved a little closer to the virtual reality. In a Friday paper in the magazine of Science Avancies, Yizhen Jia, a graduate student in the Material Engineering at Ohio State University, his adviser Jinghua Li and their colleagues report that they helped volunteers enjoy the delicious aromas aimed at representing distant coffee, fried samples.

In an interview, Mr. Jia discussed a photo of him modeling a version of a device that he and his colleagues built, which relies on microfluids. Hanging on his edge are those that look like five or six packs of sauce that would add to the instant Ramen. The packages feed on a small slipped tube in his mouth. When miniature pumps in the packages receive a signal from a sensor immersed in a liquid away, they go to work. In this case, the purpose of the researchers was to accurately convey the taste of a glass of lemonades.

In a more complex version of configuration, packages containing a variety of substances such as salt water, citric acid and glucose are arranged in a semicircle at a table, allowing a person at the bottom of the tube to take other flavors.

Why, you might ask, would you like to enjoy someone else’s fish soup? Mr. Jia points out that it is common to be able to see and hear what is happening far away. Why not be able to enjoy it? Or maybe you want to enjoy the recipes in a cooking book before committing to making them. Maybe one day there may be a button in the online food purchase services so that you can practically enjoy different hot sauces before buying them.

Right now, these scenarios can look a little miraculous and the device, to say softly, a heavy heavy. Researchers who stay after the new work, however, are not the only ones working on equipment that can allow us to enjoy and smell things that are not in our vicinity.

“There are people who try to do this with direct electrical stimulation in your language,” said Mr. Jia. “There are people who try to use other ways to give chemicals. We are using a water pump. “

In this paper, the team pump sent various concentrations of flavoring lemonade for volunteers. They demonstrated that study participants could reliably evaluate samples from sourness. Whether the researchers plunged a sensor in the lemonade to generate the aroma, or simply used a recipe to mix the chemicals transmitted by the pumps, the effects were similar.

When volunteers were sent by coffee aromas, fried eggs, cake, lemonade and fish soup generated through chemical recipes, they were able to identify exactly which of the five tastes would be fed most of the time. With a wider variety of chemicals and more recipes, more foods can be simulated, researchers suggest.

It is more complicated than it sounds, however: not all tastes are as easy to simulate. When you are working with small amounts of juice, it can be difficult to nail the concentrations of taste molecules so that a subject has an experience similar to the real thing. The smell and quality of food and drink are also intertwined with the experience of taste, too. Think about the aroma of coffee and the way in which the liquid is increasingly thicker than water.

“Everything has to gather for you to say,” this is good coffee, “said Mr. Jia.” A point of chemicals in your language will feel different. “

The team is now investigating if the faint vibrations in the tongue can be able to help simulate the food structure. They are also curious if fragrances can be used to help round up the sensory figure. And they think they may be able to get miniature pumps to be a little more miniature.

Ideally, you will not need to hang any such device from your edge. One day, perhaps, the whole issue can be quite wet – a closet or a pendant, transmitting flavor from afar.