Category Archives: Food

Business, Entertainment, Food, Technology

Cooking Wars: Popularizing the HoloLens before it’s Released.

Leave a comment
An aspiring Chief or Cook armed with a HoloLens on a special edition of the Food Network show Chopped?  How well would HoloLens and Human come together to create a brilliant dish?
At the TV show’s core rules, each contestant must come up with a dish to be served to the Judges.  The caveat, the Chiefs must use all the ingredients from a ‘blind’ basket.  To enable a Chief with a HoloLens would instantly give the contestant a potentially ‘unfair’ advantage.  Bringing a computer with Internet access and your list of digital recipes would, on the ‘Surface’, be an equivalent advantage.
If the producers of Chopped want to level the playing field,  why not allow the other contestants use of a Microsoft Surface, continuing along the same lines of providing a HoloLens to one, or potentially all of the Chiefs.
‘Adhoc’ cooking with a HoloLens, the user may:
  • Search libraries of food recipes, filtered by the basket ingredients.   HoloLens uses object recognition to identify each of the items taken out of the basket.  Chiefs should not have to ‘say’ or ‘input’ the ingredients to the HoloLens.  Take every advantage to speed up, not slow down interaction of Chef and machine ‘working together’
  • A step by step walk through to execute the recipe, HoloLens and human working together. e.g. HoloLens highlights the salt on the user’s field of vision.  HoloLens articulates what is needed and when, like a tutor over your shoulder.
  • Recipes may have a ‘pause’ to allowremind the Chief to ‘check the food’, and provide feedback to the HoloLens.  AI on the HoloLens may indicate back to the Chief to action, such as the Chief saying it tastes too XYZ, so HoloLens responds, add NN of Salt.
  • HoloLens may also state reminders such as ‘you should be plating your food by now’,  or you haven’t added this ingredient yet.
  • The HoloLens may guide the ‘food plating’ process, almost like an empty puzzle being populated.

Note: Microsoft is not responsible for any  accidental cuts. 🙂

What’s Next?

IBM’s Watson goes into battle on Bravo’s Top Chef  with the aid of any household  cook, and an Augmented Reality (AR) Headset, such as the HoloLens.

Business, Food, Technology

FDA: Nutritional Facts Labels Go Digital

Leave a comment

The FDA is considering new guidelines for Nutritional Facts Labeling.    The Nutritional Fact labels on foods and other goods under the FDA umbrella have a tremendous amount of details for the consumer, e.g. daily allowances, from vitamins to sodium.

Providing all of the Nutritional Fact details on the package is great, but how can we hope to track all of these data points to make sure we’ve achieved targeted daily goals.  Established diet systems, e.g. weight watchers, have suggested targets for calorie intake.  Some programs suggest counting Carbs.  All of these nutritional details are not only daunting to read, who would have time to track them? What facts are important to track?

Now the FDA is considering the requirement of adding a QR Code to our food Nutritional Facts labels.  If a consumer scanned the QR Code with their smart phone, they would have all of the Nutritional Fact details in digital form.  The digitized facts may then be imported into any smartphone app to monitor any of these values, and use the data to fit any 3rd party diet.  Monitoring food intake just got easier and more usable.  Alone, on a package of food, the Nutritional Facts are just data points, the digitized data can be easily integrated into our meal to meal consumption.   Furthermore, as these data points are analysed, and coordinated to other metrics, such as body weight, diets can become smarter, and even the FDA may make adjustments to the  daily allowances.  How many people really use these data points?