Table 88: Food for Thought
An immersive AR learning experience, pushing culinary discovery and boundaries
UX Design and Mixed Reality
Team
Natalie Fajardo, UX/XR Designer
Emily Xie, XR Developer
Ian Fan, XR Developer
Tiffany Wang, UX Researcher/Content Strategist
Anne Burnett, Producer/Storyteller
Skills
UX Design, Figma, Unity Engine,
Oculus Quest 2
Duration
3 days
Table88 is an Augmented Reality experience where players can “consume” food not physically but by “digesting” images, sounds, origins, and histories of their favorite foods. It is an entertaining, educational, accessible, and empowering Mixed Reality experience where users can ‘curate their own cuisine’ by selecting a platter of food that can satisfy needs for both familiar comfort foods as well as what a player’s appetite for exploring new foodways.
The prompt of "Presence" was given by Reality Hack's MIT XR Hackathon, a hackathon held from January 13th to 15th, 2023. (Link to GitHub Repo)
Problem
What we eat and how we eat is an expression of our cultural heritage but this is in jeopardy as ethnic communities across the nation face cultural erasure due to growing food deserts, gentrification, and the worsening economic struggles that immigrants and marginalized communities face. So the question is, how can we use immersive technologies to reflect and affirm our food traditions and lived experiences?
How can we engage museum visitors to share their lived experiences with food, affirm our traditions, and celebrate diversity in different cultural heritages with immersive technologies?
Solution
To support efforts to preserve and promote traditional food culture and heritage, we wanted to create a tool to storytell each of our team member's relationship with food.
For many of us, food is a key signifier of our cultural identities and national origins. It’s where you find your communities, and comfort, celebrate holidays with your friends and families, and the list goes on. Our relationship to food and its presence in our lives denotes our social identities and national origins. The presence of food and the rituals of shared meals brought all of us together as a team.
Emphasizing other's Voices
Survey
I analysed other similar educational tech platforms (UDemy, Skillshare) and non-traditional learning communities (Reddit, YouTube, Facebook Groups) to get an idea of similar user flows and journeys in terms of searching, participating, and sharing. Both Udemy and Skillshare had discussion forums, however Udemy's was only inclusive among instructors. Skillshare's was only pertinent to their course, but participation was there as students shared their projects and peers replied with comments and questions, like Coursera's. Searching for specific help and questions unrelated to courses pertained to the idea of sub-communities, especially within Reddit and Facebook Groups. Although YouTube is not known for having a discussion forum, I always favored their algorithmic front page to be exposed to new or related topics.
Brainstorming
We attached the Zed Mini (camera enhancement, video passthrough) and Leap Motion (hand-tracking) to the Oculus Quest 2 headset.
Wireframing
User Flows
Evergrowing community-building
Visitors contributing to Table 88: Food for Thought is crucial to authenticity because it allows multiple perspectives and voices to be heard, creating an accurate representation of our community. Our end-to-end user flow makes it so the ecosystem of creating content is endless but also extremely personable.
Reflection
Compatibility of the device and hardware. We want to make hand-tracking work for free-hand interactions in AR. Oftentimes, the AR visuals will spawn in a different location where the user is at. It was hard for user to interact with game objects because of that.
We are proud that this is a community-based project. It is a two-way interactive experience and something that is important to all of us. Table88 supports the collection and sharing of food heritage and multicultural cuisine by providing an inclusive and accessible platform where players can explore foods from all over the world and they can also experience the cultural context, cooking traditions and personal stories associated with the diverse foods available in the Table88 Augmented Reality environment.