Only in Japan: lickable 'Taste your TV' invented, you can lick your TV

After 11 years of writing for TweakTown, it feels like there are waves of "WTF" news that fly across my screen... and today my friends, is another day of crazy news.

Meiji University professor Homei Miyashita has created a prototype lickable TV screen that can imitate food flavors, so that you could lick your TV and literally taste it -- which is why the device is called Taste the TV -- or TTTV. Taste the TV has a carousel of 10 flavor canisters that are sprayed in a specific combination to create the taste of particular food.

From there, the flavor is rolled on hygienic film over a flat TV screen for viewers to... well... lick. In the current world we live in through the pandemic, I don't see how licking your TV can be a good thing... but I guess the excuse of being able to taste food from the confines of your walls, and never venture out into the world again... is leading us into the world of licking our screens.

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Miyashita told Reuters: "The goal is to make it possible for people to have the experience of something like eating at a restaurant on the other side of the world, even while staying at home".

Miyashita is working with a team of around 30 students, where they've produced a bunch of different flavor-related devices with the new lickable TV screen being just one of them. Miyashita has said that he's built the TTTV prototype himself over the last year, adding that a commercial version of a lickable TV screen would cost around 100,000 yen to make -- $875 or so.

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The lickable TV technology has been discussed with companies that would use it to apply a pizza or chocolate taste, to something like a slice of bread... I guess, because why not. Miyashita hopes that there will be a platform built around his technology similar to music, where instead of listening to various songs, you can taste various things by licking your display.

One of the students tested the TTTV machines for reporters, saying the screen tasted like sweet chocolate. She said: "It's kind of like milk chocolate. It's sweet like a chocolate sauce".