You may have been moved by the ghostly image of Mother Teresa on that sticky bun back in '96, but I believe I can one up the nun bun: say hello to Margie on a Latte.

In a time when printing is pushed to the way back of the media bus, along comes the promise of a nifty new technology twist that just might make the phrase "inkjet printing" exciting to the masses - at least to those willing to shell out a few more beans for a personalized cup of joe.

A young engineer in Massachusetts has created a prototype for printing images on, get this, a latte. By devising an ink cartridge filled with caramel sugar and loaded onto a portable Kodak/Diconix 150 Plus printer, Oleksiy Pikalo invented a brand new type of latte art.

When I read about it in the Boston Globe and realized that OnLatte, Inc. was based right here in greater Boston, I knew I had to meet the makers. I contacted Josh Grob (not Groban, ladies), the company's Director of Products and Services as well as its co-founder, who invited me over for a look-see.

I couldn't leave Frank Romano, the King of Inkjet, out of this particular coffee klatch, so I asked him to join me. One frigid Saturday morning, hours after Boston's first Nor'easter of the season, Frank and I drove 20 miles for a cup of coffee we would never drink.

That's how we met Oleksiy and Josh, who explained to us just how they got inkjet technology to customize coffee drinks.

Oleksiy is an electrical engineer who specializes in embedded systems programming, FPGA design (FPGA stands for Field Programmable Gate Array) and photonics. He stumbled on a description of how to make latte art and was hooked. He's the inventor of the technology and co-founder of OnLatte, Inc.

"It was quite difficult to reproduce even a simple pattern consistently, so I figured that there must be an "engineering solution" to this problem," he said. "I ordered a book about inkjet cartridges with a serial printer kit, and a plotter on eBay, and with some experimentation I was able to create various vector images on coffee using off-the-shelf professional caramel coloring and a modified cartridge. A friend of mine took a short video of the machine in action and uploaded it on YouTube."

Right away his video was getting several thousands of views daily. So in a "semi-serious effort," he submitted a Siggraph demo paper - and got accepted. (SIGGRAPH stands for Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques. It's the name of the annual conference on computer graphics.) "At that point, I had no choice but to build a much faster prototype and form a company, which resulted in OnLatte, Inc."

The team is simultaneously working on the engineering blueprint and a fully working demo version of the machine (to be completed in Q1). They say that it will take at least 50 customers to finance the first production run of the machines, and they're already more than half way through this number. I sent Josh my Margie cartoon to use. He made my latte in his apartment kitchen - nothing special about this drink, no secret ingredients - and positioned the cup right below the printer, with the foam not quite touching the machine.

Within a minute, I started seeing my image appear, line by line (or hair by hair), on the surface of the foam. Don't worry, it wasn't ink. They use caramel (burned sugar) to create images on foam.

"The best part about using caramel is that it is the same colorant that makes coffee brown," Oleksiy said. "The fiber in coffee beans turns into sugars, and sugars caramelize during the roasting process. So it is virtually impossible to figure out which part of the color is from espresso and which is from the newly created image. Plus, we would hate to add any additional unnecessary chemicals into the beverage."

Are there any limitations, I wondered? Amazingly enough, printing on an uneven liquid surface is not the biggest challenge. High-contrast images work the best. The major hurdle right now is establishing the manufacturing chain for the caramel-filled cartridge.

We sat and talked about this new invention for an hour, and my image stayed on the surface of that freshly made latte the whole time, with barely any loss of detail. Images with lots of fine detail hold up for a shorter time, we were told, since the foam is not static. It will dissolve some of the detail away in 5-6 minutes.

Where do they see their market for this latte art? Coffee shops and restaurants, caterers and event planners. Any drink with a foamy top will work. I wondered, too, if they could print images on custard desserts.

Is printed latte art in the cards for future weddings, reunions, bar mitzvahs, birthday celebrations, and the like? I think it could work. It was incredibly exciting to see my face sitting there in a cup of coffee. So what if no one would want to actually drink the coffee. We'd all be taking photos of our drinks to share with our friends and relatives. It's 1:1 latte, a whole new personalized printing application. I tip my cup to its inventors!

To learn more about it, visit www.onlatte.com or contact Josh Grob at josh@onlatte.com.

©2009 Margie Dana. All rights reserved. You're free to forward this email to friends and colleagues: please do! However, no part of this column may be reprinted without permission from the author.

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