From immersion to emotion: virtual reality as the new frontier of sensory science.

This Letter to the Editor expands on Da Silva et al. (2025), who showed that realistic virtual environments enhance emotional engagement and sensory acceptance during beer consumption. We argue that virtual reality (VR) bridges experimental control and real-world context, enabling deeper exploration of emotional dynamics in food perception. However, immersive research requires ethical and methodological caution regarding discomfort and cultural variability. Moreover, protocol standardization, overing exposure time, scenario calibration, and user familiarity is essential to ensure comparability and reproducibility across immersive sensory studies. Integrating biometric and neurophysiological data analyzed through artificial intelligence may further advance this field. Ultimately, VR offers a path for sensory science to move from measuring taste to understanding how people feel while tasting.