Multi-sensorial virtual reality and augmented human food interaction

In the field of virtual reality (VR) research, media technologies to create a realistic feeling of being present in a real/virtual world by duplicating multi-sensory information have been studied over a long period. Recently, technologies for multi-sensory feedbacks achieved a major breakthrough by utilizing cross-modal interactions. By changing sensory stimuli through only one modality using these technologies, the impression from our experience can be modified significantly. These novel technologies have a great potential in changing our food consumption experience and behavior. For example, "MetaCookie" is a flavor augmentation system that enables us to change the perceived taste of a cookie by overlaying visual and olfactory information onto a real cookie. "Augmented Satiety" is a system that enables us to control the perception of satiety and food intake implicitly by changing the apparent volume of food with augmented reality and computer vision techniques. This paper introduces such novel techniques that augment our eating experience by using multimodal VR techniques and discusses the future of Human Food Interaction.