• A Japanese professor has created a lickable TV screen that replicates the flavors of food.

• The machine involves 10 flavor canisters that spritz combinations of food flavoring onto a plastic sheet.

• From there, one need only lean in to get a taste of the food displayed on the screen.

Your days of wondering what the delicious food on cooking channels tastes like may well be over.

A Japanese professor has developed a prototype of a lickable TV screen, that allows for the flavor profiles of food to be created. With this device, all one needs to do to taste the food on the display is lick the screen.

The device is called Taste the TV (TTTV) and involves 10 flavor canisters spraying a combination of flavors onto a plastic film that’s layered onto a flat-screen TV, in an attempt to recreate the taste of a food item.

“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,” Meiji University professor Homei Miyashita told Reuters.

“I’m thinking of making a platform where tastes from all over the world can be distributed as ‘taste content.’ It’s the same as watching a movie or listening to a song that you like,” Miyashita added. “I hope people can, in the future, download and enjoy the flavors of the food from the restaurants they fancy, regardless of where they are based in the future.”

The professor added that this device might come in useful for budding sommeliers and chefs — who need to taste things while honing their craft but are disadvantaged because of remote learning.

Meiji university student Yuki Hou, 22, did a demonstration for Reuters, telling the machine that she wanted to taste sweet chocolate — after which the flavor canisters squirted a sample onto the plastic sheet attached to the screen.

“It’s kind of like milk chocolate,” Hou said, after licking the screen. “It’s sweet like a chocolate sauce.”

Miyashita told Reuters that he built the prototype over the last year. He estimated that if a commercial version were to be created, it would cost $875 to produce.