Researchers have used technology-enhanced plates and a lot of imagination to create a fun way for diners and chefs to enhance the dining experience. Yes, this basically means you can now play with your food. Computer science students and food enthusiasts at Australia's Monash University have designed a simple and streamlined system that features a plate equipped with electrodes that can be programmed to move condiment droplets around the plate.
The "Dancing Dish" system draws inspiration from the art of carefully crafted dessert platters, focusing on different flavor combinations, but also allows those preparing these complex feasts to create a narrative around the dishes.
"For example, chefs can predetermine the placement of food droplets and ingredients, and they can program the dish frame by frame like an animation," said lead author Jilian Deng from Monash University's School of Information Technology. "We can put solid items and water items together, we can blend two different flavors together, we can deliver various things to plates, we can play with chemical or physical reactions like in molecular gastronomy."
Although computing and food have had some intersections in the past, this is the first time it has been done in such a way, allowing creativity and highlights to be expressed more dynamically.
Florian Mueller, professor at Monash University, said: "The fusion of gastronomy and computing will change our understanding of computing and gastronomy, not as two distinct things, but as a new field that brings the best of both worlds together. This will not only change the hospitality industry, as they can tell new and different stories through interactive food, thereby creating more engaging experiences, but it will also transform computer science education, allowing students to learn computer knowledge through eating food."
The researchers also worked with chefs to bring the game to life and presented the resulting new dishes to study participants.
Monash Club head chef Matthew Birley, who attended one of the workshops, said: "This project helps us think more keenly about the interaction between diners and food as we create our dishes. We really start to interact with how diners feel and move. I think this will have a huge impact on our work as chefs in the restaurant industry."
The paper was published in the journal "DIS'23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Design of Interactive Systems".
For more information about the Dancing Food Project, visit the ExertionGamesLab portal, or watch the video below: