Augmented Reality for Cooking. Learning to Cook is a Productive…
By: Tanveer Inamdar
Tags: Cooking, Tech, AR, Humanlearning, Technology

The advent of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) has opened the door for many industries to help them make the most of their businesses and invest less money. The food industry is no exception. Learning to cook at home is easier with technology that uses AR to project instructions about how to cut vegetables, prepare ingredients, and more. Restaurants can even train chefs using AR displays. AR may provide information and descriptions directly. There’s no need for any books, pens, or paper. For visitors, AR menus can visualize each dish. This allows diners to make better choices and avoid disappointment. Read on to find out more about how AR can improve the food industry.

Learning to Cook is a Productive Entertainment

Source: Hartbeat Acumen

The pandemic has brought out the cook in everyone. As going out could be risky, home cooking has become necessary. Cooking was a dwindling art and now it has come back. People have begun to cook more at home, and that is a positive thing. Speed and productivity are widely sought after among recruiting executives. And cooking can help if you’re lacking in this area, or if you just want to develop your time management skills. Timing often comes into play while preparing a meal. Cooking is science as well as art. It’s a science that you can use to get to the desired solution (making your meal). You follow instructions and budget your time correctly while using the physics of heating and cooling food. It is also a mild physical activity that will assist you to de-stress, unwind, and plan for the next day of work. Standing and moving about in the kitchen after a day of work can help you stretch and give yourself a much needed light workout.

AR can be your Personal Cooking Instructor

Source: Cloudinary

Augmented reality (AR) is a technology that superimposes information and virtual entities on real-world scenes in real-time. To create a new artificial world, it uses the current environment and adds knowledge to it. PokemonGo is a common example of an AR app. If cooking isn’t one of your top skills, AR could help you master it in no time. Scientists at Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan have developed a kitchen with ceiling cameras and projectors that use AR overlay instructions directly on the ingredients. It will guide amateur chefs through slicing and dicing vegetables, whether to boil or fry a dish, etc. without having to look into books or screens.

Robots can be your Kitchen Assistants

A small robot assistant named Phyno can sit in the kitchen. When its cameras find that the cook has stopped their actions, Phyno asks if the step in the recipe has been complete. Cooks must reply ‘yes’ to proceed or ‘no’ to have the robot repeat the instructions. Currently, the system can only help you prepare fish and slice onions. Robot assistant Chefling makes preparing your meals, getting your grocery, using your ingredients more effectively, and keeping track of your pantry easier. It learns your priorities and customizes the way it supports you accordingly.

AR apps for cooking

InThe Kitchen App

The app allows users to build and decorate their own virtual cupcakes AR. Users can select a cupcake, make it as big or small as needed, add colours, icing, sprinkles, etc. and even add text like “Happy Birthday,” and more to the rendered image. The app can give some cupcake decorating ideas or be used purely for entertainment.

About Eat

Augmented Reality’s introduction to the food industry paves the way for new learning and entertainment scenarios. About Eat makes playing with virtual food more fun with the use of interactive services. About Eat enables users to simply aim the smartphone at them to receive AR knowledge about food items. A Microsoft HoloLens (AR glasses) software allows users to integrate a virtual kitchen into the space around them, enabling them to connect and prepare a delicious recipe with items and kitchen utensils. In schools, this can be applied to encourage productive entertainment for kids.

ServAR

The AR application ServAR can estimate portions. Precise measurement of food portion size is a challenging task. Visual information is an important portion size measure, so technology based aids can help customers serve and estimate food portions.

AR and VR for a Virtual Culinary Experience

Source: Pinterest

Using advanced technology, businesses can replicate the eating experience by hacking vision, taste, smell, sound, and touch. Thereby tricking the senses of people into thinking that the food they consume is a gourmet meal. It works by adding an aromatic diffuser, a VR headset, a bone conduction transducer (a system that imitates the chewing sounds conveyed by soft tissues and bones from the diner’s mouth to the eardrums), a gyroscopic utensil, and bland food. Diners can choose any meal in any location they want such as sushi in Japan or a steak in Argentina.

AR Menu Cards

The technology used by KabaQ allows diners to visualize a menu in 3D thanks to a process of digital rendering and photography. Restaurants could display their menu to their customers in 3D using smart device technology, allowing them to make educated food decisions and ensuring that their needs are met or even surpassed. The visual representation minimizes the risk of consumers selecting food that does not meet their expectations. It also eliminates the uncertainty around the sizes of portions and ingredients used.

Conclusion

With cooking becoming somewhat of a lost art thanks to endless eating out, home delivery, and ready-made options. The use of AR could rekindle the passion for cooking. AR can be a promising instructional tool for not only cooking but other areas as well. AR and VR have played important roles in training healthcare professionals and soon we can expect it to revolutionize the way we cook, eat, and even order at a restaurant.