

Google Glass could be the virtual dieting pill of the future - derpenxyne
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/140926-google-glass-could-be-the-virtual-dieting-pill-of-the-future

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danellis
This has nothing to do with Google Glass. The article describes an augmented
reality system. Glass is not AR -- you don't look _through_ it. It's just a
display that is unobtrusively visible in a small part of your vision.

~~~
Lambdanaut
I don't see why somebody can't build an AR app using Google Glass.

~~~
jpatokal
Because you'd need hard AR to do dynamic cookie-increasing, and neither Google
Glass nor anything else on the horizon can do that. Michael Abrash explains it
better than I can:

[http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-
hard-...](http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-ar-
anytime-soon/)

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jaipilot747
Great technology, but a couple of things make me doubt if their findings
reflect real life.

The processed images are patently deformed and unnatural. The whole thing
works only if you have a blue backdrop and even then filtering the fingers out
fails. The guy in the video makes it sound like it works only for Oreos (in
Japanese), and this video shows the experiments were probably conducted only
with pineapples and/or Oreos[1]

Given that experiments would have to be conducted in such an artificial
setting, how reproducible are the results in real life scenarios? These
questions could from the paper but unfortunately that is behind a paywall.
Maybe someone with access could clear that?

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzFNWLL0l-o>

EDIT: Reading it back, this sounds like I am trying to dismiss their
technology though that isn't what I am getting at. I'm just wondering how well
this could be applied IRL.

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michaelfeathers
Looks like a nice trick. I suspect that they might get a similar effect if
they made Oreos appear a sickly green in the field of vision.

While the sizing hack is neat, I think there are a lot of other ways to
process images of food to make people eat less of it. I'll leave that to
everyone's imagination.

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Andrenid
How is it supposed to trick you, when you can feel exactly how much you ate
when you put it into your mouth? Not to mention you KNOW that everything
you're looking at is bigger, because you put the AR headset on in the first
place to do exactly that.

~~~
karamazov
You'd be surprised. Eating less food when you have smaller plates is a well-
established behavior, even though your argument still applies - you can feel
exactly how much you ate, and you know that your plates are unusually small.

~~~
mtgx
I can definitely concur the opposite. The more I have in my plate, the more I
want to "finish" that meal, and there I end up eating more.

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aetherson
Except that there's no WAY that Google Glass will be able to seamlessly
overwrite the image of an object in the environment. It's going to be a HUD,
not a Rainbows End-style real-world-reskinner.

~~~
joonix
It's a computer with a display. I don't see how you can say with such
certainty that it won't be able to do that. It just depends on how open Google
makes the Glass app ecosystem.

~~~
aetherson
No, there are several hardware components:

1\. It is all-but-certain that the Glass hardware won't be able to "blank out"
anything real. At best, it would be able to superimpose a ghostly oreo on top
of the real oreo, with the real oreo fairly clearly visible beneath.

2\. I don't know whether the Glass hardware will be able to display anything
in the center of your field of vision, and would certainly believe that it
won't be able to.

3\. Then there's the question of whether the graphics processor will be able
to push enough pixels fast enough to have a smoothly animated image "live" in
your field of vision. I'd tend to doubt it, but, again, don't know. It's not
what it's designed for.

4\. Then it's all-but-certain-again that the Glass hardware won't be able to
locate an object in three dimensions at close range well enough to put
different images on each lens (or even if it will be able to put different
images on each lens). You'd need multiple cameras for that, assuming that
nobody helpfully put some kind of locater device in your oreos.

And that's just the beginning of the difficulties. Your claim is something
akin to saying that you can run Halo 4 on an original iPhone because, hey, an
iPhone is a general purpose computing device with a color screen. Hardware is
important.

And none of that touches the rank implausibility of software that can in
natural environments locate "food" and make it seem bigger. I mean, sure,
maybe if you're specifically looking for oreos, but for everyone whose diet
problems are not restricted to idiosyncratic-looking cookies, it's just not
going to happen in a time frame of "the next few years," even if the Glass
hardware were infinitely capable.

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sj4nz
Or, you could just adopt a paleo-diet and dispose of these mind-tricks.

~~~
unalone
There's room for compromise between "adopt extreme diet" and "eat
unhealthily". Paleo is one of the many philosophies I studied while I was
developing my own eating behaviors, but there are plenty of foods I enjoy too
much to fully stick to a plan that cuts happy things out of my life.

The problem this solves, in my mind, is less "unhealthy food" and more "
_tiny_ , unhealthy food", and that's interesting to me. Food that packs a lot
of calories into a small space can be hugely detrimental to a good diet plan,
because you don't realize how much you're eating. Embiggening the food to make
you think you're eating larger quantities is a completely silly but still
interesting idea.

Incidentally, anybody who finds this visualization cool and is also worrying
about their own diet: you might find _Picture Perfect Weight Loss_ worth a
look. By comparing the calorie counts of similar foods, it does a great job
highlighting which foods are shockingly worse for you than still-tasty,
slightly-healthier counterparts. I own a copy and occasionally briefly skim
through it, and simply having those visuals has helped train me into avoiding
certain nasty cravings. Book preview at: [http://www.amazon.com/Shapiros-
Picture-Perfect-Weight-Loss/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Shapiros-Picture-
Perfect-Weight-Loss/dp/0446691313)

~~~
sj4nz
I'm unsure how you mean "extreme diet." If you harvest seeds of wheat which we
cannot eat normally (we're not birds!) and have to grind it up into a fine
powder, then add water, leavening, and sometimes sugar to make it "palatable",
which is the more extreme diet?

~~~
indiecore
Do paleo people always treat their diet as some kind of religion? There isn't
anything special about not eating carbs, I lost weight, got fit and did it
just fine while still eating bread.

~~~
Adirael
A lot of people do. I did paleo for a few months and I lost weight and felt
awesome almost all the time. My only problem with it was that I'm not a huge
fan of veggies. It's also an expensive diet and it can be very boring if you
don't have much time to cook.

I also learned I can process wheat and lactose just fine, it's not the poison
a lot of paleo people make it seem.

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indiecore
What? Why? Anyone who would install this app already has enough willpower to
just _not_ eat the oreo and anyone who actually needs this would probably just
uninstall it.

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nodata
Are you seriously claiming that everyone who can _install a diet app_ is also
able to successfully _permanently modify their diet with no additional
assistance_?

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rplnt
Yes. Being able to do something isn't the same as actually doing it though.

~~~
unalone
Being _physically_ able to do something isn't the same as actually being able
to do it. Mental/emotional contexts can make it very hard/stressful to change
your eating habits, and often the stress isn't worth the end result.

This suggests a way to make changing habits more convenient, and the response
of some people here is to sneer at the people who need such convenience. Which
is somewhat typical, but still unfortunate.

