Meta cookie+: An illusion-based gustatory display

Abstract

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. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.