Guinness Uses VR to Boost Drinkers' Taste Sensations

Guinness is inviting U.K. supermarket shoppers to take a sip-along, sensory trip designed to enhance appreciation of its drinks. Working with R/GA London and using a VR headset, Guinness will offer Tesco customers around the country a chance to experience shapes, colors, and sounds that, they say, are guaranteed to make three of the brand's beers -- Guinness Draft, West Indies Porter and Hop House 13 Lager -- taste significantly better. Participants lose themselves in the 360 environment, while the voice of Guinness master brewer Peter Simpson guides them through the experience, pointing out exactly when they should taste and smell the beers. All the sights and sounds are abstract and bespoke. The grapefruit aroma of Hop House 13, for example, is heightened with an explosion of brightly-colored, fast and angular shapes, accompanied by high-pitched sounds to bring out the bitterness of the beer. Alex Wills, managing director of Content Studio, R/GA London, said in a statement, "We're excited to use VR not as a gimmick, but for what the technology was actually designed to do: suspend the senses and transport you to another place." Research by Professor Charles Spence, a food and flavor scientist at Oxford University, helped to establish which sights and sounds have the best effects on the taste of each product.

Guinness Uses VR to Boost Drinkers' Taste Sensations

Featured Stories