Food Media: Exploring interactive entertainment over telepresent dinner

Abstract

Families have strong desires to have fun together, even at a distance. "Food Media" is an exploration of appropriating food and food activities as a medium for family communication and entertainment, across generations and over a distance. Traditionally, food has always been a social hub which brings people together for communication and entertainment. As the chances for remote families to enjoy shared entertainment are decreasing greatly nowadays, we propose "Food Media" as an intuitive multimodal interaction platform to engage remote people into social communication and entertainment within the telepresent family dinner context. Rather than fancy multimedia or computerized social games, this system breathes interactive entertainment into domestic routine activities of family dining, introduces multi-sensory interactions like touch, smell and taste to support enriched experience of interaction, connects and entertains people over a natural and playful eating experience. Copyright 2011 ACM.