Instead of eating a dish in rainy London, why not taste the experience of Mumbai, Paris, Bangkok, the list is endless!
Umami is an immersive virtual reality (IVR) interactive 9-course food tasting experience that aims to reframe your senses and change the way you experience food, taking you on a multi-sensory journey that combines virtual reality, food and fantasy. In a sense, we not only aspire to deliver a life changing experience, but a means to reprogram all perceptive anticipations while distorting your senses.
At Umami, we want to use VR to bring the world of food to the table. Whether you see the vineyards of Bordeaux or the busy streets of Mumbai, this immersive experience combines all senses to heighten the sensation of dishes around the world. Through our phones, we live more detached from reality and therefore I wanted to create an experience that transports us back to reality through food. Many people love to Google the menu before going to a restaurant and pick a dish that they are comfortable with therefore already knowing the taste and overall look of it. I wanted to use VR to encounter food in a stranger way – not knowing the dish you are receiving and only knowing the city where it is from. This experience creates the sensation of entering a space that immediately identifies itself as somehow separate from the real world to keep you on edge and grant you an appreciation of taste in a more surreal and intense way.
Beach VR Prototype
Umami seeks to artistically alter a person’s taste by changing what they can see, smell and hear. However, it must be noted that taste is one of the most difficult senses to recreate as it is resulting from a chemical reaction on the tongue allowing many entrepreneurs the opportunity to emulate this sense in the VR space. Robin Dando highlights that ‘when we eat, we perceive not only just the taste and aroma of food, we get sensory input from our surroundings – our eyes, ears, even our memories’ suggesting that our taste is heavily influenced by where we are. Therefore, at Umami, our VR experience highlights how art meets food to augment and essentially re-define dining by thought-provoking taste when other senses are altered.