Institute For The Future

Artifact from the Future: VR Eating

This post expands on one of four forecast perspectives in our Seeds of Disruption: How Technology is Remaking the Future of Food research. It explores how, in the next decade, a variety of technologies could leverage emerging science to enhance and personalize food experiences to make food more satisfying. Read more about the future of satisfaction below and see the other three forecast perspectives to learn more about remaking food experiences.

The Future of Satisfaction + Food

When we think about the future of satisfaction* in food, airplane meals might seem like a strange place to start. After all, airplane food is pretty much universally hated. But a lot of what makes an airplane meal so terrible goes beyond the food itself. It’s the whole atmosphere: you’re in a cramped space, staring at the back of someone’s seat for hours on end. And you don’t have a whole lot of variety or choice; (there are generally exactly two options for every meal). But imagine, in a decade, you’re selecting flights and your airline offers you a new perk: a personalized virtual reality meal.

So you put it on this VR headset, choose to eat your meal on a beach, and all of sudden, the cramped airplane is transformed into a tropical beach at sunset. You can see and hear the ocean waves, gently lapping at the shore. You smell fresh fish sizzling on a hot grill and you look down, and you see exactly that. You pick up your fork and assume it’s just going to be the same lukewarm whitefish you’ve had every time you fly this route. But it’s not—it's juicy and flakey and flavorful, and you really can’t bring yourself to believe it’s the same meal that was in front of you when you first put the headset on.

What we’re trying to communicate with this artifact from the future is that, in a decade, we’ll have new ways to create more satisfying, personalized food experiences, even in contexts like an airplane.

Signals From Today

Already, we’re learning a lot of surprising things about what makes a satisfying food experience. And many restaurants today already use scent and the design of physical space intentionally to create a specific eating experience. But we’re seeing experiments that take this concept to the next level. For instance, a restaurant in England called The Fat Duck serves a popular dish called “sound of the sea.” It’s a plate of oysters and other seafood, served with edible faux sand and sea foam and a seashell with an ipod in it, which plays ocean sounds. Now, this may sound like an amusing novelty, but it’s based on solid research from a team of scientists from Oxford, who found that the sights and sounds of the ocean improve people’s perception of the taste of seafood.

And this same team of researchers has also been investigating the effect that appearance and weight of utensils and bowls and plates have on flavor. They found, among many other things, that you can alter a drinker's perception of how sweet and aromatic hot cocoa is by changing the color of the mug, and that drinks are more perceived as more “thirst quenching” when consumed from a glass with a "cold" color like blue.

Elsewhere, researchers have found that altering the color and smell of a cookie changes people’s perception of a cookie’s flavor, (which they accomplished with the use of a VR helmet), transforming it, in the mind, from vanilla to chocolate or strawberry.

So you can imagine, that once you begin to stack all of these findings on top of each other, you can use that information to start to optimize a person’s entire sensory environment for specific effects.

In the coming decade, as we better understand how we can manipulate the senses to create different kinds of food experiences, and the tools to do so become increasingly sophisticated, modular, and affordable, we’re likely to see this approach incorporated into new contexts—like airplanes or apartments—and customized down to the individual.

The Future of Food

This kind of customization is another big part of the story of satisfaction in the future of food. Already, we see placebo research that indicates that the effectiveness of certain placebos isn’t universal, but is actually highly influenced by culture. So for one person, eating on a VR beach might be the best way to enhance the meal, whereas for another, it might be a pasture or a cityscape.

But of course, satisfaction isn’t just taste. Feeling like we’re bettering our health and not damaging it is another important element of satisfaction. And we’re just starting to learn how individualized the relationship between our health and food is.

Already, we’ve seen advances in personalized nutrition. For instance, there’s a company called Nutrigenomix that provides a test for a panel of genes related to how you process different kinds of food as an individual. Essentially, you spit into a vial, then you send it in to them, they test it and create a report of their findings and recommendations and send it to your dietitian. Right now, this service provides personalized recommendations around caffeine, omega three fatty acids, vitamin c, folic acid, whole grains, saturated fat and sodium. As the science gets more sophisticated, we could see some pretty granular recommendations start to emerge.

We’re really unearthing, at a pretty rapid rate, an astonishing number of variables that impact our long and short-term sense of satisfaction as individuals (things like chronobiology and findings around the microbiome). All of this knowledge, and technologies that act on this knowledge, are going to allow us to personalize our foods experiences to satisfy us in truly new and different ways in the coming decade.

*“Satisfaction” is defined fairly broadly here, talking about both the sensory experience of eating—taste, texture, etc—and the effects food has on us—does it make you feel full, heavy, energetic, happy, do you feel like it’s improving or hurting your health over the long run, etc.