In this paper, we propose the illusion-based "Psuedo-gustation" method to change perceived taste of a food when people eat by changing its appearance and scent with augmented reality technology. We aim at utilizing an influence between modalities for realizing a "pseudo-gustatory" system that enables the user to experience various tastes without changing the chemical composition of foods. Based on this concept, we built a "Meta Cookie+" system to change the perceived taste of a cookie by overlaying visual and olfactory information onto a real cookie. We performed an experiment that investigates how people experience the flavor of a plain cookie by using our system. The result suggests that our system can change the perceived taste based on the effect of the cross-modal interaction of vision, olfaction and gustation.
The main contribution of this paper is to realize computer generated augmented flavors and establish a method to integrate gustatory information into computer human interactions. There are several reasons for the scarcity of research on gustatory information. One reason is that taste sensations are affected by a number of factors, such as vision, olfaction and memories. This produces a complex cognition mechanism for a user's gustatory sensation, and makes it difficult to build up a gustatory display which produces a specific taste on demand.Our hypothesis is that the complexity of gustatory sensation can be applied to the realization of a "Pseudo-gustatory" display that presents the desired flavors by means of a cross-modal effect elicited by visual and olfactory augmented reality. We propose the Edible Marker system, which can detect the state [number/shape/6-degree-offreedom (DOF) coordinate] of each piece of bitten or divided food in real time, and the "Pseudo-gustation" method to change the perceived taste of food by changing its appearance and scent. We construct "MetaCookie+" as an implementation and discuss its validity through an exploratory study.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.