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Home » Diet » Diet goggles: Can virtual reality glasses help you lose weight?

Tokyo University professor Michitaka Hirose and his team developed goggles that make cookies appear bigger to help users' diet. (Yoshikazu Tsuno / AFP/GettyImages / June 6, 2012)

June 7, 2012, 7:40 a.m.

You've tried Atkins. You've tried South Beach. Now try the goggle diet.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have invented a pair of goggles that may help people lose weight by making it look like what they are eating is bigger than it is.

Put on the goggles and suddenly a normal-size Oreo looks like it's the size of a doughnut, and a doughnut looks the size of a personal pizza.

"There is this idea that depending on whether the size or portions are big and small, the amount of food people consume changes," said Michitaka Hirose in a YouTube video. "So we thought it would be interesting to try out the concept using computers."

The computerized goggles use an algorithm that lets them magnify the size of the food while keeping the hand holding it the actual size. That's what makes the food appear to be so much bigger. And the wearer of the goggles only sees the altered image.

The goggles look pretty clunky, but apparently they work. In experiments at Hirose's lab, volunteers ate nearly 10% fewer cookies when the cookies appeared to be 50% bigger, according to a report by AFP.

The goggles can also work for those who need to put on a few pounds. When the size of the cookies appeared to be two-thirds of their real size, volunteers ate 15% more.

Hirose has no plans to start selling his diet glasses, and they do seem a bit cumbersome and impractical for real-life use. However, we're wondering if down the road a similar product might be available for Google Glasses, and whether there might be other uses for this size-altering technology.

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Diet goggles: Can virtual reality glasses help you lose weight?

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Home » Diet » Diet goggles: Can virtual reality glasses help you lose weight?