Just in time for the festive holidays, this cocktail glass allows you to drink all the “wine” you want without getting drunk (sans the calories). Deceiving the drinker’s senses, the latest invention by the researchers of National University of Singapore (NUS) stimulates the taste buds to create difference taste notes.
Short for virtual cocktail, the brilliant invention – Vocktail – is breakthrough technology, using a mobile app to configure the smell, sight and taste of a drink via Bluetooth. While the virtual sight and taste can get very real, what’s in the drink is actually just water!
It works like this – the device holding the Vocktail glass is designed with three scent cartridges and three micro air-pumps that release scent molecules, along with the two electrode strips that sends electric pulses to your tongue, mimicking the taste buds to sense different tastes.
Conquering your senses in multiple ways, the device aims to give a more surreal experience by incorporating a light-emitting diode (LED). As people tend to associate colours to flavours, such as red is bitter, blue being salty and sour for green, the LED flashes the drinker’s choice of colour to enhance the realness of the drink.
Invented by Nimesha Ranasinghe and his team, the research was conducted to bring comfort to the elderly and people with dietary restrictions, allowing them to taste their favourite foods even though they shouldn’t. Aww.. that’s so thoughtful, but hey, it’s probably heaven sent for anyone who wants to only consume healthy foods but finds it hard to do so!
