Extended reality adds meat flavors to plant-based meals for eco-friendly dining

Extended reality makes it possible to artificially modify human sensations. For example, researchers have succeeded in using extended reality to make vegetarian food even more attractive.

“This could be one way of facilitating more ecologically diverse food production and, at the same time, encouraging people to eat healthier,” says Roope Raisamo, a professor in human-technology interaction at Tampere University.

Extended reality (XR) refers to all environments where reality meets the virtual world. It includes techniques such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR).

Raisamo’s research group recently completed a project that examined the impact of XR on the experience of eating food. The food research was led by Research Professor Nesli Sözer at VTT Technical Research Center of Finland Ltd. The goal was to create eating experiences and new food items that people would find pleasant and that would give them a feeling of satiety. This could help make foods such as seaweed become more widely used in food preparation.

The findings are published in the Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces.

One experiment studied how introducing meat flavors to plant-based “meatballs” changed the eating experience. By means of XR, a simple olfactory display added a pleasant fragrance to the meal. This side of the study was implemented by Raisamo’s group.

“The premise was to bring two previously rarely collaborating disciplines together to do something completely new,” says Raisamo. He has studied the use of haptic sensations in XR extensively.

Extended sensory experiences may be a future element in marketing and communication

“In the future, the olfactory and haptic sensations introduced by extended reality can be used in marketing and communication, for example. They’re not yet widely available, but some time from now, it will be quite possible to add modules that produce scents and haptic sensations to users’ devices. Haptic devices, meaning devices that produce touch sensations, are already on the market, but they’re not yet available to everyone,” says Raisamo. For example, social media channels favored by young people could utilize these as part of communication.

Multisensory interaction is one of the strongest areas of Raisamo’s team. They had used artificial intelligence in their research long before AI became the phenomenon it is now. At present, Raisamo studies the augmentation of a person’s functional capacity and situational awareness of where they are and what is happening. This project is also being implemented in cooperation with VTT. The University of Lapland is involved, as well.

“The results allow for the optimal use of extended reality systems through human-AI cooperation. We measure cognitive responses, task completion and user experience when a user interacts with an AI-based extended reality. We combine cognitive space modeling, detection, personalization and forecasting with modeling, contextual awareness and adapting interaction methods,” Raisamo says, describing the project.

Raisamo leads TAUCHI, the Tampere University Computer-Human Interaction Research Center, which has 90 researchers in total. Raisamo’s own group includes 20 researchers. TAUCHI’s mission is to improve human-technology interaction by producing knowledge and solutions based on the natural ways people communicate.