DigiDine | FOOD HERITAGE& MEMORY
Type: Food Heritage, MR Experience Design
Team: WanderLens Lab, Steven, Iris, Toro Comm
Time: October 2024 - November 2024
The Introduction of the MR Food Learning Experience
IDEATION
This MR experience design uses local food as a medium to connect people and share the stories behind each dish. It offers users the opportunity to customize a virtual dining environment, recall the memory of eating with family in festivals and share the narratives of their local cuisines with friends from around the world.
The concept centers on using MR as a tool to regenerate personal memories of meaningful experiences. Through brainstorming and ideation, we chose food—an inherently local and intimate element—and the act of eating together, which is often associated with reunion, joy, and connection, as the trigger for memory recall and scene recreation.
As Sather-Wagstaff (2015) explains, “In human practice, memory, perhaps at its most basic, may be defined as acts of recounting or remembering experienced events... Yet memory is also simultaneously agentic in that it is an aspect of the social construction, production and performance of everyday, lived social life which, by extension, includes heritage and identity.” Inspired by this understanding, the VR experience seeks not only to evoke users’ memories of shared meals with family and friends but also to foster new memories through virtual communal dining with new acquaintances.
The Senario of Using the MR Experience
LEARNING MODE
We designed three modes of eating senarios, which can help people to learn from different food cultures:
Connector
A Connector using Invitation Mode allows families and friends to share a meal and recreate the warmth of home with customized dining spaces. With hand tracking, you can interact with your food and participate in a Virtual Toast, offering a tactile, interactive experience that mimics real-world dining.
Adventurer
An Adventurer using Match Mode can meet new people from around the world, fostering global connections over shared meals. With AI-powered real-time translation, language barriers disappear, making global dining experiences seamless and encouraging deeper cross-cultural understanding.
Dreamer
A Dreamer using Companion Mode experiences immersive dining with AI companions. The AI companions can introduce the history and story related to the food ingredient that the children are eating, converting the eating expereince into a learning opportunity of food heritage and culture.
With the different learning experience of food culture, DigiDine ensures that dining is not just about food—it’s about connecting, sharing, and experiencing meals together in exciting, innovative ways, no matter what kinds of food culture you want to know more about.
The Choices of Eating Companions
The Adventurer Mode
The Connector Mode
The Dreamer Mode
LEARNING SETTING
We designed three modes of eating setting, so that the users can choose the envrionment they feel comfortable with, which is also a crucial factor influencing the effect they learn about the food heritage.
Pass-through
With the pass-through mode, the users can eat with other people in their own home. With the familar eating envrionment, it may remind the users of personal stories and memory attached to the food the are eating, which stimulate them to share the stories behind their food to others.
DIY
The DIY mode allows users to design the eating envrionment by themselves according to their preference. Through inviting their eating campanions in the space that they designed, the users can further show their personalities and introduce the stuff related to their food and personal memories.
Travel
The travel mode relies on the 360 images of various places, which can provide a unique eating experience. It also makes the introduction og the food history from AI eating campanion more attractive.
The Choices of Different Eating Settings
The Passthrough Mode
The DIY Mode
The Travel Mode
THE DESIGN
The interface include the three steps of selecting the modes. The users can select the eating campanion and the eating setting step by step. In addition, the experience is based on mixed reality so that the users can designed the virtual setting of the eating envrionment while can see their own meals.
The interaction depends on the hand gestures instead of handlers, for the sake of easily eating food. The users can using simple gestures including slideing, pointing and grabing. The users can select their avataurs, and after entring the same virtual room, they can interact with the avataurs. The cooperative system is also adopted, which means that the users can see each other if they enter the same virtual room.
The Interface of Selecting the Eating Campanion
The Interface of Selecting the Eating Setting
REFERENCE
Sather-Wagstaff, J. (2015). Heritage and Memory. In: Waterton, E., Watson, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Heritage Research. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137293565_12
XR Design Challenge: https://devpost.com/software/digidine