Emerging Technologies

Emerging Technologies

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FoodGenie: Play with Your Food

Food has always served as a social hub, bringing people together for communication and entertainment. Cooking and sharing food is regarded as an important activity to enhance relationships and intimacy. However, as people's lifestyles become increasingly busier and more immersed in digital social networks, most of them rarely have opportunities for in-person, shared social enjoyment. As a reproduction and extension of this social fun around food, our project provides a novel and seamless system to enable communication and entertainment through food. From our perspective, the domain of playfulness is much broader than just games: potentially any activity can be approached and performed in a playful manner. People can obtain entertainment not only in leisure time, but also during routine activities. Here we present the system which allows people to enjoy social fun during food preparation, transmitting love, warmth, care, and enhancing intimacy at the same time. Using a simple mobile application on touch-screen interface, people can creatively design their own patterns and messages on portable devices, and send these to the crafting mechanism through wireless communication. The synchronous printing is done in three dimensions with multiple flavors using accurate step-motor control and triple-syringed food material injection. Multiple types of edible material provide variations in flavor, color and texture, providing exponential eating experiences to enrich complex, non-verbal communications.

Jun Wei, National University of Singapore
Adrian David Cheok, National University of Singapore
Xavier Roman Martinez, National University of Singapore
Remi Tachi, National University of Singapore
Yongsoon Choi, Keio University
Jeffrey Tzu Kwan Valino Koh, National University of Singapore
Roshan Lalintha Peiris, National University of Singapore
Xuan Wang, National University of Singapore
Qing Zhu, National University of Singapore