Can Augmented Reality Help People Eat Less?

Apparently, even hunger is in the eye of the beholder.

New weight-loss glasses are bringing high-tech augmented reality to the diet wars. A Japanese research team has created the glasses to trick a dieter's brain into thinking food is bigger than it is. In theory, this will make him believe he's eating more than he is.

How do they work? The glasses have an image processing system that increases the apparent size of food and recognizes the eater’s hand to make it appear the same relative to the food. Pretty cool, right?

To test the glasses' effectiveness, the researchers conducted a study in which people ate cookies while wearing the glasses. On average, they ate 9.3 percent less than people not wearing the glasses, according to The Yomiuri Shimbun. And if the researchers enlarged the size of the cookies by 50 percent, the subjects ate 10 percent fewer.

Will augmented reality become the next big thing in dieting? Only time will tell: The research team's findings will be presented at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, held in Austin next month.