Are virtual cocktails the future of drinks?

We’re as eager as you to try this new virtual reality technology that stimulates your senses and heightens your drinking experience.

Designed at the National University of Singapore, and presented at the 2017 ACM on Multimedia Conference, it's predicted to revolutionise cocktail drinking.

Coined as the ‘vocktail’, this new virtual reality cocktail is every cocktail - or mocktail - lovers’ dream. Basically, the Vocktail utilises three common sensory modalities - taste, smell, and visual colour - to create virtual flavours and augment the existing flavours of a beverage.

The report from the Multimedia Conference explains that the inspiration for the invention stems from the art of mixology, and the researchers, led by Nimesha Ranasinghe, wanted to expand on this even further.

“People [already] relish flavoured beverages and use various drink mixers or ingredients to enhance, adjust, or create new flavour sensations," the report noted. 

"The concepts of the cocktail and the mocktail, which are deeply associated with humans drinking culture, are all about mixing multiple ingredients or other beverages such as spirits, sodas, juices, syrups, and food colorings.

"The art of mixology [and] the concept of favour or food-pairing studies intrinsic properties of different food ingredients and items [to] enhance the flavour of existing recipes but also assist in creating new non-traditional recipes," it adds.

Inspired by mixology and art of the humble cocktail or mocktail, the Vocktail takes this one step further, described as an "interactive drinking utensil that digitally simulates multisensory flavour experiences."

Basically, the system consists of a cocktail glass created with special technology that allows users to create customised virtual flavour sensations and then make it actualise via a Bluetooth enabled app.

“Imagine next time you order a cocktail you can customize its flavor using a mobile app, or try out entirely new flavors — for example, you order a mojito, but you want to try it with a hint of chocolate or strawberry,” Ranasinghe explained to Digital Trends. 

Source: Report - Vocktail: A Virtual Cocktail for Pairing Digital Taste, Smell, and
Color Sensations.

Having already been tested on approximately 21 ‘randomly selected’ university students, the report concluded that the Vocktail was a great success, stating: “The electric taste, together with the overlaid colour, helped to convey a seamless flavour experience to the participants.”

VR booming for drinks companies

Diageo's global future & culture planning director, Zoe Lazarus, told the Global Drinks Forum in Berlin last month that virtual reality holds huge promise for the drinks industry.

"The rise of digitally-enabled virtual socialising, although in early stages of development, will create fresh opportunities for the drinks industry to explore the possibilities of the digital world and beyond," she said.

Lazarus also cites Statista research, which suggests that by 2020, the VR software and hardware market will be worth $US25.6billion. She believes virtual socialising will become a huge trend over the next three to five years. 

"Today's consumers are becoming more comfortable encountering the virtual world and virtual people so it's only natural that they will move into virtual socialising," she says. "How long will it be until we are all buying virtual drinks for each other, in virtual bars? Sooner than we think."

In September, Bacardi's Global Travel Retail introduced a virtual reality cocktail programme for Virgin Atlantic's Clubhouse customers.

The 'Immersive Digital 360 Drinks Experience' involves consumers wearing VR headsets to virtually visit some of the world's best bars, while drinking signature drinks from Virgin's menus.