Extended Reality to Promote Eco-Friendly and Diverse Food Choices

Extended reality allows for the artificial alteration of human sensations. For instance, researchers have managed to use extended reality to enhance the appeal of vegetarian food (1^✔ ✔Trusted Source
Extended reality to help produce eco-friendlier food

Go to source). “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, who has been carrying out research on extended reality for different use cases with funding from the Research Council of Finland (RCF) for years.

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 Centre 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.

Enhancing Food Experiences Through XR Technology

One experiment studied how introducing meat flavours 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 favoured by young people could utilise these as part of communication.

Optimizing Extended Reality Through Human-AI Cooperation

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 uses RCF funding to study 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 modelling, detection, personalisation and forecasting with modelling, contextual awareness and adapting interaction methods,” Raisamo says, describing the project.

Reference:

1. Extended reality to help produce eco-friendlier food - (https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1079154)

Source-Eurekalert