New goggles serve up see-food diet
Japanese scientists have developed a set of revolutionary new ‘diet goggles’ which trick over-indulgent eaters into scoffing less food.
Friday 15 June 2012, 10:21AM
Anyone donning a pair of the glasses will almost certainly have eyes too big for their belly, with the specs being specifically designed to make food appear up to 50 per cent larger than it actually is.
And for all those wondering – which is probably all of you – it’s still not clear whether the goggle’s will make your beer glass look 50 per cent bigger and make you more drunk.
The goggles can however fool people eating a savoury snack into thinking they are actually eating a tasty chocolate treat.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo say the illusion tricks the brain into thinking they are about to eat super-sized portions, while the wearer’s hand remains normal size.
Volunteers wearing the augmented reality device were told to eat biscuits until they felt full to test the effectiveness of the goggles.
“By changing the size of the food and scaling it up we have shown that participants eat about 10 per cent less over the course of a day,” said Takuji Narumi, an assistant professor working on the project.
“This is because the brain believes visual information rather than the information it receives from the stomach or our other internal sensors.”
There are no plans yet to release the product commercially.
