When food industry meets the world of virtual reality

A futurecasting of how the worlds of AR and VR can collide with the F&B industry to impact our eating habits and how we interact with food

- Jen Thomas

In 2021, deep in the heart of Covid-19 and when most people didn't care otherwise, Facebook changed its name to Meta. At the time, I hadn't the foggiest notion of what they meant, and it took another two years (to precisely now) to understand what was happening: Meta has embarked on its grand plan to adopt an early stance in virtual reality. This virtual reality was called a "metaverse."

Even if someone decided to waste their time walking me through the mere idea of metaverses, it would have been a long, arduous slog to get me to understand what technology advancements are being cooked up, and cooking, they most certainly are. Getting down to brass tacks, "a metaverse is a virtual reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment with other users," according to Oxford Dictionaries.

I don't blame you if this sounds like a gamer who doesn't get off the couch to play video games with a headset on, chatting to people around the world. Although the gaming industry is one of the forerunners in developing virtual reality, other sectors are now ready to sink their teeth in. For example, some reasons behind exploring virtual worlds, or metaverses, seem practical. Disaster relief teams could use virtual reality to train on specific life-threatening situations in a safe space, and surgical teams could run through a complicated surgery in advance without the high-stakes fear of mucking it all up.