You Better Eat to Survive! Exploring Edible Interactions in a Virtual Reality Game

"You Better Eat to Survive!" is a two-player virtual reality game that involves eating real food to survive and ultimately escape from a virtual island. Eating is sensed through capturing chewing sounds via a low-cost microphone solution. Unlike most VR games that stimulate mostly our visual and auditory senses, "You Better Eat to Survive!" makes a novel contribution by integrating the gustatory sense not just as an additional game input, but as an integral element to the game experience: we use the fact that with head-mounted displays, players cannot see what they are eating and have to entrust a second player outside the VR experience to provide them with sufficient food and feeding him/her. With "You Better Eat to Survive!", we aim to demonstrate that eating can be an intriguing interaction technique to enrich virtual reality experiences while offering complementary benefits of social interactions around food.