Virtual Reality Kitchen That Helps Novice Cooks

KYOTO SANGYO UNIVERSITY, KYOTO, JAPAN. A new intelligent kitchen set-up has been recently developed to help novice cooks and chefs stay on track. The technology works with cameras and projectors mounted on the ceiling of the cooking area. It helps the user by overlaying the necessary steps directly on the ingredients with the projectors.

This was developed in favor of the users who do not have much cooking skills but are willing to learn. It will make cooking much easier for beginners because the instructions they need are presented right in front of them. That way, they won’t have to look at the cooking instructions on a book or on a screen. It will also minimize distractions so that they could concentrate more on what they need to do to complete the cooking process.

Computer scientist Yu Suzuki and his colleagues were the developers behind the technology which took place at Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan. Let’s say you want to cut and fillet a fish but you don’t know how to. All you need to do is to lay the fish down on the chopping board and the cameras will automatically detect the parts of the fish that you need to cut. The projectors will show you virtual lines where you need to start cutting. The fun part is that the fish in front of you will have speech bubbles projections that will tell you the next steps.

You will also find cooking more fun when you have a small countertop robot named Phyno that will assist you from time to time. Phyno’s main job is to make sure that you were able to follow the particular task before moving on to the next. The robot will ask you if you’re done and if you say yes, it will let you proceed to the next step. If you say no, it will repeat the instructions so you can carefully follow.

Right now, the new kitchen technology is only limited to preparing fish and slicing onions. The developers are still working on a newer system that will help users with some real cooking process instead of just preparing fish and slicing onions. There are so many more improvements to be done with the technology which also means there will be a lot of things to look forward to.