Flavor visualization: Taste guidance in co-cooking system for coexistence

Abstract

Currently we are developing a co-cooking system that helps users to make similar tasting dishes, even though users may all be in remote locations and potentially cooking at different times. Because it is difficult to explain verbally or through written media about cooking taste in the co-cooking interface system, we've researched a flavor visualization module that guides unique tastes with graphical information in the co-cooking interface system. To achieve this, firstly, we conducted literature studies to clarify the flavor and visualization. We executed user studies to extract linguistic vocabularies of flavor expressions and sensibility vocabularies from each of the expression elements of visualization and flavor. We then built connections between sensibility vocabularies from the expression elements in visualization and flavor through literature studies and user interviews. Based on this relationship grouping work, we could make a relationship table of flavor and visualization expressions that broadly contains the relationships between flavor expressions and visual expressions. We could then realize a real-time working prototype based on the relationship mapping table that we studied. This flavor visualization can tackle the task of augmenting, through cross modal interactions, feelings of tastes by visual means. In further research, we are thinking flavor visualization will express individual cooking signatures, as derived from a personal history of taste and physical cooking habits. Also, it can visualize cooking tastes that express an individual's unique taste signatures for a more precise and emotionally involved remote co-cooking experience. Through this, we are expecting possibilities for fostering intimacy and family communication using the memory triggers that come from tastes. We hope this will make us emotionally feel coexistent in separated locations, and even different times, by facilitating conversation and other sensory communication with family and friends. ©2010 IEEE.