INTERACT 2005: Hot Ideas for Interfaces in the Kitchen

A fire projected onto a heating oven? A blizzard raging every time the freezer is open? A blue light for the moment that the cold tap runs cold? Leonardo Amerigo Bonanni of the MIT Media Lab was presenting what he called "Cooking with the Elements" at INTERACT2005 in Rome.

Perhaps the single most inspiring application of ambient information this year, Bonnani's research looks at what happens if you represent the behaviour of the appliances in the kitchen in a visually meaningful way using augmented reality.

He ran through a history of, on the one hand, ambiguous ambient information design and, on the other, the addition of overly prescriptive visuals into kitchens (see the link to his slides below). He explained that limited elbow room and too much information can make following virtual cooking instructions projected into real space impractical and people were found better to manage with a paper recipe card. Then he showed how combining ambience and augmented reality could produce useful peripheral information to kitchen users.

'Modern kitchens are complex laboratories full of processors and displays but modern kitchens
offer almost no sensory feedback,' he said.

A red light for hot water and a blue light for cold, set to come on at particular temparatures in the "Heat Sink", was interpretable to all but one of the 16 novice users aged 18-35 who tried it out, on first use. In addition, it was found to cut the amount of time that the tap was left running.

Other tests with a cooker that showed flames when hot, and with a fridge that showed falling snow when open, produced similar levels of comprehension and some environmental benefits - less waste, and less chance of scalds and burns.

'A projected fire costs more than a small red light, but it's better. It's a chance to spice up these mundance appliances a little. It brings back some of the sensory pleasure of cooking without the fire, smoke and other disadvantages,' he said, 'but it also changes what people do.'

Bonanni concluded that 'Synesthetic mapping allows for intuitive interfaces in critical
situations.'

He is now running a test with 20 people in their homes to see if the beneficial effects wear off as the novelty does.

Associated Link: Cooking with the Elements (pdf)

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