Smell-e Technology: Validating immersive multisensory VR food environments to study food choice

Many of our food decisions are made in sensory-rich environments, such as supermarkets, that trigger multiple senses (e.g. sight and smell), especially towards unhealthy foods. This is why eating a healthy diet can be difficult, even if someone wants to eat healthily. To better study the factors that influence our food choices, virtual reality (VR) technology can be used to simulate real-life food environments. However, people's responses to virtual food cues are shown to be weaker than their responses to real-life food cues, making research into this topic generally less valid.

Weaker responses may occur because VR technology currently only relies on visual information, ignoring the important role that our sense of smell plays in our food choices. Indeed, food odors can enhance people’s craving and salivation to visual food cues (e.g., food pictures). Therefore, this project will compare people's responses to food cues in a unisensory (visual sense) VR supermarket, multisensory (visual + olfactory sense) VR supermarket, and a comparable real-life setting, using state-of-the-art materials.

Project objectives

This project has three objectives:

• develop an innovative immersive multisensory VR food environment;
• evaluate whether this immersive multisensory VR food environment is more representative of real-life food choice situations;
• reflect on the potential of the immersive multisensory VR food environment to improve our understanding of the complex factors that impact our everyday food choices.

Potential impact

The immersive multisensory VR infrastructure created within this project, which combines VR technology with the cutting-edge Sniff-O olfactory device, will have immediate benefits for the wider scientific VR field and can be directly applied to various food and non-food domains. For example, the set-up can be used for clinical purposes (e.g., cue exposure addiction therapy and smell training), or to simulate how structural (policy) changes to the food environment can impact dietary choices.

Moreover, project insights are critical for establishing a fundamental basis for a wider research trajectory on olfactory food navigation. The plan is to conduct a series of follow-up studies using the (validated) immersive multisensory VR supermarket on an inbuilt prioritization (or “bias”) in human memory for the locations of high-calorie foods, and  explore novel  interventions that can target this cognitive bias to facilitate healthier eating.

Taken together, the project can ultimately help to better understand and address a variety of societal health challenges arising from poor diets (e.g. overweight/obesity, type 2 diabetes).

Duration

The project will run for one year starting from July 2023 onwards.

Multidisciplinary project team

The SMELL-E consortium is a multidisciplinary public-private partnership. Each partner brings a unique and complimentary set of capabilities to safeguard the success of this project.

• Lead applicant Dr. Rachelle de Vries, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Communication and Cognition, specializes in researching (cognitive/psychological) drivers of food choice and individual differences in health (eating) behavior. Rachelle will lead and manage each research phase, and provide direct supervision for the research assistant. 
• Dr. ir. Nynke van der Laan, Associate Professor at the Department of Communication and Cognition, has research expertise on the application of VR for both measuring and changing food-related behavior. She also has extensive experience with VR development (e.g., the VirtuMart), which will be instrumental in the creation of the immersive multisensory VR food environment.
• Dr. Tessa van Leeuwen, Associate Professor at the Department of Communication and Cognition, is an expert in sensory processing, particularly on cross-modal perception and multisensory integration. Tessa will consult on research decisions using this perspective.
• Dr. Matti Vuorre, Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Psychology, has substantial expertise in cognitive psychology and Bayesian statistics. Matti will consult on study design and statistical modelling.
• Dr. Sanne Boesveldt, Associate Professor at Wageningen University & Research, is an internationally-recognized leader in the field of (chemo)sensory science and eating behavior. Her major research lines include the influence of ambient odors on appetite regulation and flavor perception, in service of promoting healthy eating behavior. Sanne will actively contribute her olfactory expertise throughout the research process.
• As a market leader in innovative olfactory products, CyNexo will provide the Sniff-O device and technical support for developing the immersive multisensory VR infrastructure.

This project is funded by Tilburg University’s Digital Sciences for Society program: