FARE—Food Augmented Reality Exposure

The Food Augmented Reality Exposure (FARE) Project represents a strategic collaboration between two leading research centers: the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Laboratory at the University of Udine, Italy, and the Humane Technology Laboratory at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy. The HCI Laboratory at Udine has successfully spun off AVIETRA (www.avietra.com), a company specializing in VR solutions for health and safety applications. The FARE system implements food exposure therapy through AR, directly addressing the theoretical and practical advantages outlined before. The system comprises two key phases: (a) Assessment phase: Patients interact with virtual food items through an AR headset. Patients can grab the virtual food with their hands and manipulate it to observe it from different viewpoints. They can also bring it closer to their mouth as if they were eating it. When ready, patients rate both anxiety and craving levels on a 1–5 scale. This quantitative approach enables systematic measurement of behavioral responses, similar to what Pallavicini et al.6 considered in their exploratory AR study with obese patients. (b) Personalized exposure phase: Drawing from patient-specific anxiety and craving ratings, the system creates customized exposure sessions focused on trigger foods. This aligns with contemporary inhibitory learning frameworks described in the introduction, where exposure therapy aims to create new, competing learning experiences rather than simple habituation. A video demonstration of the system can be watched at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PumK-9O5Ens.