Coming Soon: Lickable TV Screens

You’re watching The Great British Bake Off when someone whips up a treat so enticing that you momentarily contemplate licking your TV screen. The idea isn’t as outrageous as you might think.

As Nerdist reports, Homei Miyashita, a professor at Tokyo’s Meiji University, recently developed a television that you can actually lick—and it’s more hygienic than it sounds. Basically, the so-called “Taste the TV” device, or TTTV, has 10 canisters that each contain a flavored spray. Those sprays create different flavor combinations, which then get deployed onto a disposable plastic sheet that covers the TV screen. All you have to do is request a flavor, wait for the machine to work its magic, and lick away.

Miyashita was inspired to invent TTTV during the pandemic, after he realized that video technology allowed people to see and hear things happening in far-off places—but couldn’t accommodate our sense of taste in the same way. With TTTV, Global News explains, you could hypothetically experience food prepared in restaurants across the globe.

The innovation is still in its prototype phase; according to Reuters, it would take roughly $875 to manufacture a commercial TTTV. And even if it doesn’t end up becoming a household fixture, it could find its niche somewhere else—like remote-learning programs for chefs and sommeliers, or taste-centered video games. The technology could be co-opted for functions beyond TV, too, such as using the flavor-spray portion of the machine to season plain crackers or toast.

Whether TTTV will end up being one of this era’s world-changing inventions or one of its weirdest remains to be seen.