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Google Glass Could Be the Virtual Dieting Pill of the Future
MrSeb writes "In a year or two, augmented reality (AR) headsets such as Google Glass may double up as a virtual dieting pill. New research from the University of Tokyo shows that a very simple AR trick can reduce the amount that you eat by 10% — and yes, the same trick, used in the inverse, can be used to increase food consumption by 15%, too. The AR trick is very simple: By donning the glasses, the University of Tokyo's special software 'seamlessly' scales up the size of your food. You pick up an Oreo cookie, and then the software automatically scales it up to 1.5 times its natural size. Using a deformation algorithm, the person's hand is manipulated so that the giant Oreo appears (somewhat) natural. In testing, this simple trick was enough to reduce the amount of food eaten by 10%. The inverse is also true: shrinking the Oreo down to two-thirds its natural size increased food consumption by 15%. This new research dovetails neatly with an area of nutritional science that has received a lot of attention in the United States of Obesity recently: That the size of the serving/plate/cup/receptacle directly affects your intake. The fact is, there's a lot more to dieting than simply reducing your calorific intake and exercising regularly. Your state of mind as you sit down to eat, and your perception of what you're eating, are just as important — which is exciting news, because both of those factors can be hacked."
Where Google would be peddling pills that increase size.
It's funny because we believe in "free will" and yet all it takes is a dash of photoshop to make us feel full faster or more slowly. Next up! Humans are a 'blank slate' and behavior is socially determined and has no genetic component!
(In other matters, how long before the malware attached to diet pill spam will start manipulating our perceptions in order to fatten us up and increase demand?)
Your state of mind as you sit down to eat, and your perception of what you're eating, are just as important
Sweet. So the secret to losing weight is just to make everything you pick up look like a giant dog turd...
Deja Moo: The distinct feeling that you've heard this bull before.
"My eyes were bigger than my stomach"
But how will the Earth cope with the loss of billions of pounds of fat shed from the asses of all the obese 'Murkans?
Just display calories, equivalent distant need to run to burn calories, and total calorie for the day?
Ore:
100 calories.
Walk 1 mile
800 calories daily total.
Or have it tell the bank to not allow any more prepackaged food purchase for the day? In fact, you could have it only allow food purchases during certain time.
That could be a great diet aid.
Just enough of a road block to make getting food for snacking a pain in the ass to get.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
As a wearer of bifocals, I've seen the effects of objects being magnified and its dimensions being distorted form reality. But, I've also seen that the brain learns to compensate for this within a day or two and everything returns to normal.
I suspect that if one was to experience this distortion only when eating that it might take a while longer for the brain to compensate. But, compensate it will.
If you want to lose weight, eat less! You fat bastard!
because both of those factors can be hacked.
I prefer the term "augmented real-time photoshopped derivatives of life apparatuses and symbols", but I digress. Somehow I get the feeling marketing people have known how to "hack" this for years.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
Come one, please don't tell me you didn't know that the plate size affects the amount you are eating? I have been to countless dinners/lunches where someone would complain about the portion when the food arrived (on a large plate) and later not finish the plate because it was actually quite a lot.
by the act of simply wearing Google Glasses, which made social contact with females impossible, which led to lack of burned of calories while engaging in sexual intercourse.
Challenge accepted.
in addition to adblock in real life the next thing I would program into my augmented reality is replacement of old and fat people with less visually offensive equivalents
fat people could become the michelin man and old people would become ents or something
man im looking forward to the future when I can just have an ignore button to wipe out everything that annoys me
What else can it make look 15% bigger?
"The fact is, there's a lot more to dieting than simply reducing your calorific intake and exercising regularly."
No, that's all there is to it.
Now, the psychological and physiological issues entailed in actually accomplishing that take a lot for some people, but reducing intake and increasing exercise is -- literally -- all there is to dieting.
How about overlaying the food with maggots or cockroaches? Posting as a person "of size," who thinks it might actually work.
I suspect it wouldn't work as well as what is being discussed here because it attempts to operate on a rational level, and eating decisions are usually not reasoned, and rational feedback often is not as effective as mechanisms that hook into visceral, subconscious responses.
Though, of course, if you know of research that shows that that kind of approach works as well as the research shown here, great, please post it.
Well, it would be a useful diet aid if there was a necessary close relationship between time of purchase and time of consumption of prepackaged food, and if you couldn't purchase prepackaged food with cash.
You put on glass or you no order here scumbag.
Make certain things bigger and certain things smaller. Maker her a redhead. Make him Brad Pitt.
Self-delusion is a grand thing.
Don't just game, Dungeoneer
I think the real question is, do we take visual indicators of food intake based on experience, or is it hard wired? If the former, this trick will only work for a while until your brain finally realizes "hey, I'm not getting as much food as I used to, maybe I should adjust portion sizes up", and now all of a sudden you are used to eating portions that "look" much bigger, and the gain from such trickery is lost.
Not to mention what might happen when you stop using the glasses - all of a sudden all the food appears much smaller, and you think you can eat more of it.
Nice demo. However, based upon my experience in computer vision, moving this into the real world will be extremely challenging.
Turn all woman into anime cat-girls with D cup sizes.
Hey, the research is done in Japan, you know there's at least one guy in the research team who thought about it!
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Yeah, I know, an animated gif is a low-brow post, but this is how I see trying to eat food that's something like an optical illusion... I can't help that it's best described visually... so here:
http://gifsoup.com/webroot/animatedgifs7/2953647_o.gif
Google Glass has a display in the top right corner of your view - the majority of your vision is unobstructed. Look at the photos of the product being worn (not the "one day" concept reel) and think about where in your view-space the screen will exist.
Something like the Oculus Rift + head mounted cameras? Sure. Google Glass in it's current form? No chance.
That is all.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon boy: Then you'll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
I see big tits, big tits everywhere!
Wow, I never through all those annoying fake articles on sites talking about "This one simple trick" would show up on slashdot ;)
What I need is for Google Glass to administer electric shocks that cause my jaws to seize shut when it detects food approaching my mouth. Then maybe, just maybe it might work.
One important factor to consider is that how much you eat in a single sitting is just your brain's estimate of how much food you need at the moment to maintain your metabolism. ...and, since foods vary in calorie density, it's often wrong.
It makes up for this the next day. If it consumed more energy then it thought, you'll be less hungry. If it consumed less, you'll be more hungry.
So that this might work for a single meal isn't much of a surprise. I'd expect it to fail for any long-term use, however.
To lose weight, one would do much better to simply stop eating Oreos. See Sugar: The Bitter Truth for more information. After simply cutting sugar from my diet, but otherwise eating as much as I wanted to, I lost 75 pounds over 6 months. The only difficult part is the first two weeks, over which it becomes painfully obvious that sugar is addictive since, no matter how much you eat, you're still hungry until you eat something with sugar in it. Once you break that addiction, however, losing weight isn't hard at all. So just stock up on jalapeno poppers and other tasty sugar-free foods and over-consume them for the first two weeks so that you aren't tempted to consume any sugar. Once the addiction is broken, your brain will start regulating your appetite in response to your leptin levels exactly the way nature intended, and you'll just naturally no longer want to overeat.
The idea that, "there's a lot more to dieting than simply reducing your calorific intake and exercising regularly", is garbage. That's all that controlling your weight boils down to. You could stick me in a room full of ice cream and pizza, as long as I don't eat excess calories I won't gain weight. All I see is an article essentially shifting the blame off of the person in control with the good-ole, "it's not your fault", line. Bull-crap. If you're overweight it IS your fault.
If you lack the will power to control your eating, that's on you. Quit with the excuses, accept reality, and do something about it... Or don't... I don't have a personal stake in your health either way. You'll be the one on the autopsy slab at 55 from a heart attack, not me.
Is this only a temporary effect, though? I could imagine that your mind creates an association between the size of the food you see and the amount of fullness you feel, but if you start changing your visual perception, I could imagine that this visual/feeling-of-fullness connection could be changed. If true, then you'd reduce your consumption for a short period of time (maybe weeks or months), but then your perception would change, you'd begin eating normally (despite the larger appearance of food), and if you stop using the glasses, maybe you'd continue eating larger portions until your mind re-adjusted itself in the reverse direction.
(A slightly bizarre effect would be that you'd become dependent on the glasses to maintain your weight. If you stop using the glasses, you'd go through a short-phase of gaining weight again.)
Magnifying the food also caused the subject to miss when trying to pick it up 10% of the time.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
I can think of a few things japanese programmers would probably increase the size of by a factor of 1.5 lol
But, not for people who know how big a fucking Oreo is.
When that amount of food doesn't keep you from being hungry you'll adjust to eating larger-looking portions, I would bet my left testicle on it.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Does the constant advertising of overly large portions of food also train us to think that such portion sizes are normal? And if we eat a healthy size instead, do we feel like we're not having enough?
Doesn't Apple already has a patent on the Reality Distortion Field?
It's essentially the same concept as The Small Plate Movement but implemented using "sufficiently advanced technology".
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
The real question here is, how long will it be before the brain adapts to this trickery? Not like we eat less of "large" food like popcorns, we just eat a bucket full of them.
Hello.... Mcfly... E=MC^2,
This google article outlines precisely the problem with matters of scale and relationships with time...
use w=mg, e=Mc^2, and f=mg
Mass s is an independent measure of weight. Yet companies like Google arent comprehending - been here, done this, with this whole nonsense concerning 'scaling' things up or down in size, technologically..
Really, do you think you're being that brilliant, outlining the plans to construct a wheel when the people here already know how to construct it?
McFly... Err.. AI, AI, we already know this.... Try something.. ermm. new...
w (is weight in a dependent system) = mass (independent of system) * gravity ( constant of dependent system per second ) * time (in dependent system)
f (energy in dependent system) = mass ( constant of independent system ) * gravity ( variable of dependent system ) * time (in dependent system)
e (energy in newtons or joules in dependent system ) = mass * ( speed of light in dependent system * time (in dependent system)) ^ 2
So what's scale and how's it related to this? Density, what you just stated was a principle of density of matter....
Isnt this common sense by now?
Kinda makes the whole "bigger oreo" example moot.
- I stole your sig.
What happens when you become accustomed to eating virtual super sized food and you suddenly turn it off? Do you eat more because everything is normal sized now? Probably. Don't take off your Google Glass or you'll put the pounds back on.
Blue dogs still do brown turds.
Whatever. You wouldn't be a bleb if all you ate was lettuce.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I've heard that to combat obesity, several states in the next year are going to impose strict upper caps on junk food and sugary soft drink sizes, under the premise that if the size is smaller, then people will not eat as much, but this study appears to confirm the opposite.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
WAY back in 1994 it was already known that 20 percent of VR users experience nausea after 30 minutes or more of immersion. This is due to the discrepecies between visual input and other motor-sensory input. The effect was so consistent that the surgeon general actually issued a warning about it: washingtontechnology.com/articles/1994/07/28/could-the-surgeon-general-warn-vr-is-hazardous-to-your-health.aspx?m=1 Hence, I think people will be much more likely to lose weight due to vomiting and nasea than some artifical size trick-of-the-eye.
Sent from my ENIAC
I'm very dubious about this. I don't spend much time looking at my food. I'm looking at what I'm reading or my fellow diners, generally family, whom I'm conversing with. My eyes spend very little time on my food.
I would posit that they have a defacto patent on it, since they have distorted the reality of so many people.
Sent from my ENIAC
I bullshit you not, there was an actual study that proved that following around fat people and yelling at them, insulting their weight, and calling them names when they ate something unhealthy, it reduced their calorie intake significantly. So it'd be pretty easy for Google glasses to do the same thing.
I believe that there is a long historical precedent for a "device, or mechanism" that "seamlessly scales" objects. They are called beer goggles, and can often be "rented" for free, worldwide.
Google Glass is only an overlay on your vision, not a replacement for your vision. So glass can make an overlay that looks bigger, but it won't replace and scale everything. Oh and it only works when you look up into the hud, it isn't there all the time...
What do you know I wrote a novel
Google make a lot of money from advertising.
I bet there will be a lot of demand from the fast food franchises to make their portions look smaller. They'd pay Google a fortune I'm sure.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
No, that's still all there was, is, and ever will be about losing weight: Take in fewer calories than you burn metabolically and you will lose weight. Whether you consciously make the decisions to do so and stick with them, or make excuses for why you don't, is up to you.
That's the side you never hear... Somehow, despite all the oversized portions of fructose-laden, overprocessed, nutrient-devoid crap fried in crisco oil masquerading as food that fast food restaurants, marketers and stores bombard every one of us with every day, I and 1/3 of my fellow Americans still manage to not be total fatasses. How is that?
Glass doesn't have the ability to change the appearance of things in your field of vision. It deliberately places its screen above and to the right of your normal area of vision so as not to obscure your visual field. For this to work with Glass, you'd have to carefully only look at what you're eating in the Glass screen... and it would probably take a lot of practice to learn to navigate the cookie to your mouth while watching it in the Glass screen. Might be easier if you looked at it in the screen and then closed your eyes before trying to eat.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
"The fact is, there's a lot more to dieting than simply reducing your calorific intake and exercising regularly. "
No. No there isn't. The trick in the article is attempting to fool you into reduce your caloric intake. It is not a new third factor. It is a way to help you if you are too stupid to realize you need to eat less or too weak to do so even if you realize you need to.
In case you never heard of Bulimia - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001381/ - it's a (mental) illness that causes the sufferers to go through episodes of binge eating and then purging.
The "Glass" may help on dieting but that might harm people with bulimic problem.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Are they likely to be augmented reality? With a glass reflector in front of the eye, I expect it to be more of a translucent HUD overlay.
They may well have gps+compass-based direction indicators for navigating, but I doubt that they'd be capable of a solid-looking images tracking accurately over what you see.
With everybody wearing these glasses and some shared protocols, people could apply virtual makeup instead of real one, color their dress/hair depending on mood (think Nymphadora from HP movie), do real world scare pranks (please look at my face closely for 20 seconds trying to spot the ghost...). And - most important maybe - all women can be given burkas as soon as voting for new goverment finishes!
Screw you guys, i'm going home.
What about blind people?
They do not see the size of their portion, so how come they are not all fat or all thin?
I call this stupid, it is not the size of what you eat that defines your metabolism needs, but actually what you eat.
On the other hand, admitting that this could even work, if you start eating -10% of what you eat now, your body will adjust to need -10% in time, so you will be back as if you were eating 100% of what you ate before. It is called the "survival mode" of the metabolism.
Apparently these glasses can also make yo' mumma look hot. Thus, no need for dieting in the first place.
Google glasses is as much a paradigm shift as mini computers to PC's and PC's to mobiles and tablets. Google glasses will replace all computers except the home server and the cloud.
ACTUALLY, there isn't.
Can we stop perpetuating this please - it is *that* simple, and if anyone tells you otherwise, they're either ignorant, or trying to make money out of the people who are ignorant to this fact.
What? No one posted a joke about what this does for the size of "your mother?"
Humor's lacking today. I know it's the last day of the week for many, but 'cmon.
I am a huge fan of the possibilities offered by augmented reality (AR) hardware and software / content, but this optical trick is just silly. As consumers become more savvy, I hope more intelligent uses of this technology will predominate.
AR can be used to make it much easier for people to access information relevant to what they see, including food nutrition / ingredients / safety information. It could calculate your daily nutritional intake and highlight insufficiencies or excesses - with every bite that you take! It can be pre-configured to warn about questionable products, recalls, allergic reactions, non-vegan / non-kosher ingredients, sodium-to-potassium ratios, and anything else of which a programmer's imagination can conceive!
AR tech fits very well with what libertarians have been saying for decades - technology gradually makes governments obsolete. All you really need is a unique ID for every type of product - the Internet can take care of the rest. You don't need a government monopoly like the FDA forcing poorly-designed nutrition labels on products - you can get much better information from Wolfram Alpha or hundreds of other competing databases, consumer interest publications, review wikis, laboratories, independent auditors, etc.
With the FDA you have a coercive monopoly that is easily corruptible and inherently inefficient... But in a free market everybody is watching everybody else, and competing data providers rise and fall on the basis of their reputation for accuracy and incorruptibility.
"Given Enough EyeBalls, All Saturated Fats Are Shallow!"
--libman
First off, I feel caloric information would be a simpler, more reasonable use of this technology. I see an Oreo and "45 calories" pops up in text over it.
That said, let's have some fun...
A full diet program would be a little more invasive: I pick up the Oreo and I'm informed I have consumed 2,317 calories today, 317 above my set limit. I eat the cookie and I'm informed I'm now 362 over the limit for the day and 1,121 for the week. At the end of the day I am told that at this rate I will gain x pounds by year's end.
At this point you could have a photo pop up at this point projecting how I will look. For even more fun, I could be compared to celebrities.
"Oh shit, pre-diet Drew Carrey. I need to stop eating these damn cookies!"*
* But they're so good.
If you want to give the powers that be the ability to manipulate and control our lives and minds even more then they already do. Then go ahead and blindly move forward with this technology. We are moving to a world far worse then the Matrix, 1984, and Atlas Shrugged.