Bon Appétit! We are team AppetizeR… and this week, our appetizer special is Cherry Tomato Marinade! Our team of five fresh-face cherry tomatoes is coming together and combining our unique tastes to form a delicious dish!
Our project is a blend of exploring mixed reality technology and designing a communal, narrative experience. We have been tasked with using Snap’s Spectacles—their augmented reality (AR) glasses—to take groups of 3-6 guests on a shared emotional journey while they sit around a table before a meal.
This concept is motivated by a desire to explore opportunities to develop better AR experiences at the ETC, along with an interest in interactive stories and the sharing that occurs when people gather for social experiences (with delicious food as the cherry on top). We want to tap into the emotions and psychological memories that people associate with coming together with loved ones and preparing a meal, which can often be far more potent than the taste of the food.
Our project quickly felt like blank page syndrome. We have so many questions to explore that we found it best to begin by answering some critical questions. Some of the important questions we felt needed to be explored were:
- Where is this meal taking place? A restaurant, at home, in a cafeteria?
- What level of familiarity can we expect from our guests? Is it a family, or a group of coworkers, or a first date?
- What type of food are our guests eating? Is it served family style, is it individual meals, is it fine dining, is it fast food?
- What is a pre-meal ritual? What can be part of a ritual?
- What emotions do we experience before a meal?
- What is the technology capable of?
- How can we intertwine the experience with the meal and not make it overpower the entire experience?
So we started diving in.
Our first answer was where this experience should take place. We have ultimately leaned towards a restaurant experience, and the decision seems to be unanimous among our team. A restaurant is more likely to be able to implement a good system for setting up the Spectacles and provide access to multiple Spectacles for a party, as opposed to relying on groups of people to already have enough pairs for everyone to wear before a meal at home. Additionally, being able to have more control over the environment that our experience is taking place in would greatly benefit our design choices. There are finer details to still be discussed such as the type of restaurant and what part of the restaurant experience our project would fit into.
As we continue to tackle all of the other questions that have come up, we have started to explore the Spectacles and developing using Snap’s engine, Lens Studio. Sample projects have shown that networked objects are much easier to implement than initially expected, though there is a learning curve involved in using the engine. Lens Studio feels a lot like other game engines, but with each different type of software there are quirks to get used to. One example is Lens Studio constantly has a run mode. On the art side, Lens Studio has functions for animations, VFX, and shaders, but there is no support for animation clip creation the way Unity has.
In preparation for the Playtest to Explore workshop on Friday, we gathered inspiration from sources like immersive dining experiences using projection mapping and other technology, food-themed animations, and shows or visual displays at restaurants. We compiled our brainstorming into a composition box, which outlined our high-level ideas around the type of experience we would make and the needs of the project. At the workshop, students from other teams got to react to our composition box with their own ideas and suggestions, which we will review and incorporate as we continue ideating and exploring next week.
