VR Food as an Emerging Industry
Could we leverage VR to have the ultimate dining experience? What does it take to convince our brain about what we’re eating? What could be the business model for bringing real food to VR? Let’s take a closer look.
We have 5 senses — Sight, Sound, Smell, Taste, and Touch — all working together to give us information about our surroundings. Yet, not all senses are created equal, and you certainly don’t need all of them to trick your brain into believing that something is really happening. For me, video games played on my ‘486’ PC back in the 90s was pretty immersive))
Food in VR is at the crossroads of real and virtual worlds. It has several key features — Taste, Smell, Color, Shape, Temperature, Texture. Secondary features are expectations or memory of the previous experience.
How can we make food with VR in mind? I see two fundamental options.
Option 1. You visualize a piece of food in VR as it is, port the color and shape into the virtual world, so there is no discrepancy in the information coming from each of the senses. Example: something rectangular as a KIND snack bar that appears the same in VR.
Option 2. You take a “blank” piece of food and visualize it in VR as something else. Example: a piece of jelly or tofu that is visualized as a California roll.
When you do Option 2, the question is: what is the minimum number of key features that one needs to mimick to trick the brain that the food is what it looks like in VR? The visual appearance is solved great in VR, so it’s not part of the equation. Hypothesis: (1) Taste and (2) Smell are the most critical, followed by (3) Texture and (4) Temperature.
Digression. Long ago I’ve seen a commercial of a little box with a neutral odor that you have to keep close to your nose as you eat so that you are not smelling the food you are eating. The result seemed astonishing: people were not attracted to the food they ate, because one of their main sources of information — Smell — got jammed. I guess the opposite situation — when you trick your Sight and Smell into believing that what you’re eating is something tastier — should work as well.
The mechanics of it. Let’s assume we have a plate with one small cube of “blank” food on it. That blank cube doesn’t have its own taste or smell, so we can add some flavored sauce for Taste and Smell. VR cameras recognize where this cube is and port its location to the virtual environment so that the user can “see” it and interact with it. Then by using “utensils” (chopsticks, fork, spoon), the user can move this piece to his/her mouth so that the cameras can confirm that the food has been eaten. Note: if you have VR gloves, you don’t even need utensils.
Business applications. How do we make money out of it? I don’t think there is much profit in the actual manufacturing of the Food-for-VR as it should be a commodity and doesn’t imply anything radically innovative or something that cannot be easily copied (unless the food is 3D printed — more below).
1. Advertising in VR. You port real food into VR, Option 1. You make it visible in VR by putting some edible paint on it. While you’re eating this snack, you are participating in an ad experience showing how “healthy and good looking and strong you’re going to be”. The commercialization approach is to sell it to brands that want to ride the hype wave of VR.
2. Digital goods. Can be Option 1 or 2 as the food itself is not as important. What is important is what it gives you inside the VR game you’re playing: god mode, health powerups, etc. It can also be a built-in mechanism so that the gamer doesn’t forget to eat — and doesn’t have to disconnect to eat. The approach here is upselling the user inside of the game, making it even more interactive.
3. Restaurant experience. You take Option 2 “blank” food with added flavors and turn it into an unforgettable dining experience. The food projected in VR can be photo-realistic or purely fictional. While the actual “blank” food and flavor/smell additives are very cheap, you are basically paying for the virtual variety that doesn’t cost anything to replicate once it’s coded. You can also pay for being in different places, cities, for watching a performance while you eat. You can set up an experience like that at a specialized location or at home.
For example, Aerobanquets is reimagining the dining experience by visualizing seemingly impossible textures and dishes...
4. Healthy Attitudes. Option 2 food can be manufactured to contain little/no nutrients. First, you can let the user eat as many VR delicious bites/snacks as he/she can without health risks or a sense of guilt (guilt-free food). Second, you can bring in a virtual coach trying to promote healthier attitudes. Third, a bit more extreme is to degrade the appearance of the food in VR to detract the user from consuming more.
4.1. Go vegetarian. There is a lot of hype around “meatless” meat. Current players care a lot that the vegan burger patty resembles meat — and that is costly. Now the manufacturers can only focus on Texture, Smell, and Taste, while the appearance is flawlessly rendered in VR.
Alternatively, VR could be a channel to popularize less common protein sources, e.g., insects.
5. Feeding those in need while preserving their dignity (my personal favorite). How to feed all the poor? Let’s fabricate food cheaply according to Option 2, but making sure it has all the nutrients and vitamins, and microelements a human needs for well-being. You can do it now without any help from VR. But in the virtual world, you enable a person to eat exquisite-looking food in a top-notch virtual restaurant where the staff treats him/her with respect as an honorable guest.
3D-printing your food. Each application above fits great with the concept of 3D printing “blank” food. The printer now only needs to get the shape right and mix the flavors (like colors in an InkJet printer) to get the right Taste and Smell. You don’t care much about how the food looks. The supply of “blank” food becomes even more commoditized: the user just needs to get raw components for the food printer.
Please share your thoughts and perspective on the VR Food subject.