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Food

You Can Now Virtually Embody a Piece of Sushi on a Conveyer Belt

A strange new virtual reality game called Ultra-Sushi-Go-Round takes viewers a high-rise journey through the Tokyo skyline from the perspective of a piece of sushi.
Hilary Pollack
Los Angeles, US

As we discussed earlier this week, the realms of food and virtual reality are finally starting to overlap, with numerous developers hunting for interesting ways to recreate the experience of dining using a combination of immersive imagery and tactile elements. Someday in the not-too-distant future, you may be able to examine a fully 3-D rendering of a dish as part of a restaurant review, or have any kind of culinary experience you want using flavor compounds that can replicate an infinite variety of tastes.

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But in the meantime, there are existing VR programs that can offer more offbeat food adventures.

The Oculus Rift headset is already available, offering a similar but infinitely more technologically savvy version of the encompassing scape pioneered by Nintendo's 1995 3-D video game contraption Virtual Boy. The Oculus is a pair of digital goggles that creates a three-dimensional experience by fiddling with your depth perception—nothing new, exactly, but with ever-improving graphics that create more and more of a trip. And one of its latest programs, according to RocketNews24, is a strange game called Ultra-Sushi-Go-Round, a high-rise journey through the Tokyo skyline as seen from the perspective of what's ostensibly a piece of sushi on a conveyer belt, directly behind plates of ebi and tamago.

According to the developer, Cubic9, Ultra-Sushi-Go-Round was birthed from a childhood dream that the creator had. "When I was a child," the Cubic9 website reads, "I wanted to become small and ride on the dish of sushi-go-round. But there are no way in reality, so I gave up … But now, it is possible in a virtual reality space."

True: anything is possible in the VR world. So if you've been gazing out of the window for decades, wishing to be a fatty slice of toro circling a dining room of sushi-eaters, why not make it so in the closest way possible?

If you've never been to a kaitenzushi restaurant—a sushi spot that operates using conveyer belts—the delivery method is certainly a novelty, particularly for children. An endless of assortment of maki, nigiri, and hand rolls whiz by on colored plates, essentially functioning as a miniature roller coaster of tastiness that you need only reach out to engage with.

Photo via Flickr user Daniel Axelson

Kaitenzushi. Photo via Flickr user Daniel Axelson

Ultra-Sushi-Go-Round takes on a more literal approach, setting the player not as a diner, but as a piece of sushi itself on a massive roller coaster that starts in a curiously robot-staffed kaitenzushi restaurant and then enters the outside world, suddenly climbing at a steep angle before treating the player to a sudden drop and even an upside-down loop. (Don't worry—the sushi remains firmly affixed, however unrealistically, to the plates.)

The gameplay is brief. But it does demonstrate that the world of VR gaming isn't necessarily limited to shoot-em-up scenarios and massive-bosomed anime schoolgirls—there might be a place for exploration of the food world, in whatever peculiar incarnation it may take.

And never forget, childhood dreams can come true, even if they are simply to know what it feels like to be a piece of sushi.