Virtual and Augmented reality is slowly and steadily paving its way into each and every field of the living world. Be it medical sciences, advertising, marketing, warzone or gaming, Virtual reality has proved its importance and recently in a fresh study it is proved that VR can actually make food taste better.
According to a recent research conducted by the scientific team of Cornell University, it has been elucidated the Virtual reality can be used to make the taste of your food even more palatable.
The experiment was conducted by a team of fifty researchers who ate three similar pieces of blue cheese with their VR headsets on. Each candidate of the group was virtually placed in a sensory booth, a delightful bench situated in a park and the cow barn of Cornell University to watch the custom recorded videos.
The panel was completely oblivious to the fact that all the three cubes of cheese are identical. After the experiment, when asked about the flavor of the blue cheese, the candidates claimed that the blue cheese they tasted in the cow barn setting had relatively higher pungency. Yes, that’s right, even the three cubes of blue cheese we’re exactly identical, it tasted more delicious in the virtual cow barn rather than in an empty cabin or park bench.
Research scientist Robin Dando quoted that during the process of eating the food, we not only sense the taste and smell of the foods, but our sensory system also picks up the inputs from the environment and situation we are in.
Although this experiment was not entirely designed to check whether VR can or cannot affect the taste of the food. But it was outlined as a kind of taste test bed, for helping manufacturers to allow people to try food in different surroundings through virtual reality without actually taking them to places.
Dando further mentioned that this survey has proved that virtual reality can be used for the purpose of food tasting as it can provide a suitable environmental condition for it. This is also going to aid the manufacturing units as using VR testing will cut down the cost to several folds.