News articles are saying that the sugar will be "hollow", so there's as much sugar particles that will reach your tongue but they will dissolve very quickly and be less dense.
I have not read those articles, nor the patent links in other threads, but your description is consistent with "instant sugar"[1].
How can a vending machine add rapidly dissolving sugar to a cool beverage? Smaller sugar grains dissolve faster, but handling suffers as they cake and stick to surfaces. So you create aggregate grains - fine grains (dissolves fast) stuck together into larger ones (handles well). Sintered agglomerates.
The final sugar particles in chocolate seem relatively undissolved (pointy)[2], and sugar particles are often stabilized by coating with stuff, so a hypothetical PR faux "breakthrough" matching your description might be "instant sugar... now in chocolate!". And didn't Intellectual Ventures move into food industry trolling a few years ago, so there's likely a market for such. And this is Nestle.
I guess that's why we drink fizzy and creamy drinks so much!
Personally I think that the future is in manipulating the taste buds themselves. Did you ever hear about the "magic fruits" Synsepalum dulcificum? It's a fruit that has molecules that binds to the tongue. The result is that anything sour will taste like sugar. Lemons will taste like candy.
Pop a pill before drinking a bitter non-sugary drink and there you go, you are drinking sugar taste without any sugar!
I wouldn't think so. There's a noticeable difference between granulated sugar and powdered sugar to the palate. This new method claims to not affect the taste, so I would think it's something at the molecular level.
So... powdered sugar?