Augmented Reality Kitchens Teach You to Cook

An augmented reality game that gets people to cook, as envisioned in the short fiction video "Sight." A recent New Scientist article rounded up research into augmented reality kitchens. CREDIT: Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazo on Vimeo View full size image

If you thought cookbook apps and convection ovens were high tech, check out these ideas for kitchens that are able to catch people's mistakes and teach them to cook. The New Scientist has gathered a few groups' research into augmented reality kitchens that overlay instructions and "cut here" lines on food as people prepare meals. 

Computer scientists from Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan have put together a demo kitchen that senses when somebody lays a fish down on the counter and is able to find the fish's outline and orientation. Then ceiling-mounted projectors beam down a virtual cut line and knife while a speech bubble appears from the fish's mouth, giving step-by-step instructions on how to filet it. 

The setup also works for onions, but nothing else yet. The researchers must program in each food preparation technique manually, so building up the system's library is slow, lead researcher Yu Suzuki told the New Scientist. He and his colleagues plan to automate the instructions in the future, he said. 

In other research efforts, Newcastle University scientists in the U.K. created a kitchen program that teaches users to speak French while they cook. And University of Washington scientists created a kitchen that tracks people's mixing and chopping. They hope in the future their system will be able to catch mistakes, such as adding the wrong ingredient into a mixing bowl, lead scientist Jinna Lei said. 

Want to see what an augmented reality kitchen might look like? The New Scientist has posted a photo from the Kyoto Sangyo work. We also saw an augmented reality, gamified cooking program in a dystopian short video we found earlier this month.

Source: New Scientist

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