TasteBud: bring taste back into the game

When we are babies we put anything and everything in our mouths, from Lego to crayons. As we grow older we increasingly rely on our other senses to explore our surroundings and objects in the world. When interacting with technology, we mainly rely on our senses of vision, touch, and hearing, and the sense of taste becomes reduced to the context of eating and food experiences. In this paper, we build on initial efforts to enhance gaming experiences through gustatory stimuli. We introduce TasteBud, a gustatory gaming interface that we integrated with the classic Minesweeper game. We first describe the details on the hardware and software design for the taste stimulation and then present initial findings from a user study. We discuss how taste has the potential to transform gaming experiences through systematically exploiting the experiences individual gustatory stimuli (e.g., sweet, bitter, sour) can elicit.