By Nur Ellyza Binti Abd Rahman*, Hamizah Anuar, Kevin Bielawski, Kasun Karunanayaka, Adrian David Cheok
In our daily life, we use the basic five senses to see, touch, hear, taste and smell. By utilizing some of these senses concurrently, multisensory interfaces create immersive and playful experiences, and as a result, it is becoming a popular topic in the academic research. Virtual Food Court (Kjartan Nordbo, et. al.,2015), Meta Cookie (Takuji Narumi, et. al.,2010) and Co-dining (Jun Wei, et. al., 2012) represent few interesting prior works in the field. Michel et al. (2015) revealed that dynamic changes of the weight of the cutleries, influence the user perception and enjoyment of the food. The heavier the weight of the utensils, would enhance the flavour. In line with that, we present a new multisensory dining interface, called ‘Magnetic Dining Table and Magnetic Foods’.
‘Magnetic Dining Table and Magnetic Foods’ introduces new human-food interaction experiences by controlling utensils and food on the table such as modify weight, levitate, move, rotate and dynamically change the shapes (only for food). The proposed system is divided into two parts; controlling part and controlled part. The controlling part consist of three components that are 1) Dining Table, 2) Array of electromagnet and 3) Controller circuit and controlled part consist of two components; 1) Magnetic Utensils and 2) Magnetic Foods. An array of electromagnet will be placed underneath the table and the controller circuit will control the field that produce by each of the electromagnet and indirectly will control the utensils and food on the table. For making an edible magnetic food, ferromagnetic materials like iron, and iron oxides (Alexis Little, 2016) will be used.
We expect that this interface will modify taste and smell sensations, food consumption behaviours, and human-food interaction experiences positively.
REFERENCES:
Alexis Little. Magnetism and Food. prezi.com, 2016. https://prezi.com/paipcqdgxopr/magnetism-and-food/.Takuji Narumi, Takashi Kajinami, Tomohiro Tanikawa, and Michitaka Hirose, 2010, July. Meta Cookie. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2010 Posters (p. 143). ACM.
Kjartan Nordbo, David Milne, Rafael A. Calvo, and Margaret Allman-Farinelli. 2015. Virtual Food Court: A VR environment to Assess People’s Food Choices. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Australian Special Interest Group for Computer Human Interaction (OzCHI’15), Bernd Ploderer,
Marcus Carter, Martin Gibbs, Wally Smith, and Frank Vetere (Eds.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 69-72. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2838739.2838817
Jun Wei, Adrian David Cheok, and Ryohei Nakatsu. 2012. Let's have dinner together: evaluate the mediated co-dining experience. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on Multimodal interaction (ICMI’12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 225-228. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2388676.2388721
Charles Michel, Carlos Velasco, and Charles Spence. Cutlery matters: heavy cutlery enhances diner’s enjoyment of the food served in a realistic dining environment. Flavour 4, no. 1 (2015): 1-8