This is interesting… Intel Labs’ Oasis Project uses your kitchen countertop to recognize the foods that you place on it, and projects a variety of interactive content.
It’s still early research, and so the sorts of interactions possible, as well as the content that’s projected, are pretty basic. But the video suggests a variety of ways people could be assisted in a kitchen of the future.
Actually, when I first watched the demo, the first thing that popped into my mind was David Small’s Food for Thought — where he used a laser sign cutter to write messages onto food. It’s not directly related to Oasis, but how we associate food with technology, as a cultural and experiential issue, is the connecting theme.
In thinking more about where Oasis-like kitchen-based R&D could go, a great inspiration should be this beautiful video, Cooking Dinner Vol. I by William Hereford. It shows a notably hands-on, refreshingly tactile, approach to food and cooking. It’s so different from the antiseptic way, almost germ-phobic and lawsuit-eager, that food is usually treated. I’d love to see how a system like Oasis could be developed to encourage such holistic changes to how we think about, and engage with, food.
[Project Oasis link via Interactive Multimedia Technology; Cooking Dinner link via SwipeLife and KN.]
