Google Glass could be the virtual dieting pill of the future | Hacker News Reader

Google Glass could be the virtual dieting pill of the future

extremetech.com

28 pointsderpenxyne27 comments

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.

Maybe if you bought two glasses and flipped one and put them on a frame? The user could "learn" to look through it just like one would use bifocals.

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

The way Glass sits on your face would not allow this, danellis is correct.

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-...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We hacker/engineering types seem to have an almost visceral rejection of the idea that we are anything less than in total, conscious control of our actions. You see this mostly in reference to advertising ("Oh, I don't see ads, and even when I do, it's not like they affect me").

But the thing is, that's not entirely true. People are not hyper-rational processors of data. We're startlingly susceptible to all sort of subtle manipulation, even when we're fully aware we're being manipulated (See the recent front page link about a guy who was sold $100 dollars in facial cosmetics despite walking in to the situation fully determined to critically analyze the techniques used as a learning experience).

The point I'm trying to say is, yes, you will know you're wearing a headset and yes, you will only have X amount of food in your stomach. But that doesn't mean the subconscious drives that run hunger and satiety (which are far more complex than just "Dry volume of food consumed") can't be tricked by visual stimulus, even visual stimulus the conscious brain knows has been altered.

The point is that, despite what you've said, they found that it works.

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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?

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.

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.

By "extreme" I mean that paleo insists not only that certain foods will affect our bodies in certain ways, but that some foods are "natural" and some are "unnatural" using pretty iffy logic. It ultimately translates to "fewer carbs and less gluten" and that can be effective for some people, though I can process gluten problem-free and I find the occasional carb coma vastly enjoyable/not super detrimental to my long-term health. The pseudo-dogma that revolves around the diet is unnecessary.

> 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?

Is that more extreme than relying on specific animal species to eat and process foodstuffs we wouldn't find "palatable" on our own, then letting biological process transform that into material which we're capable of harvesting off their bones, cooking using an artificial heating process, and then putting into our bodies?

I'm not saying that raising animals to kill them is particularly "extreme", I'm saying that if you want to, you can make any food process sound like it's much more "unnatural" than it is. I wouldn't eat chicken feed, but I'll sure as heck eat the eggs that chickens poop out. Or the things we squeeze out of a cow's udder – who saw udders and thought that was a normal thing to do?

The idea here though, as far as I can see, is for people who are lazy and presumably fat. A person like this (possibly the average American) has very little will power and wants to eat what they like. If tech like this existed they could feel like they are eating everything they want while still taking in less calories than they would normally.

Or we could act based on actual scientific evidence instead of vaguely trying to approximate what our ancestors ate in a blind appeal to nature.

The thing really gets to me about it is that in addition to being based on fallacious thinking, the approximation is so selective. How can we equate a paleolithic human spending a day catching fish to a modern human buying a fish at the supermarket?

And don't even get me started on coconut. Getting to the meat of a coconut in the paleolithic era was a time intensive (and calorie burning) process that bears little resemblance to opening the jar of hexane-extracted coconut oil you bought at the health food store.

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.

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?

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

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.

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