Flavor Visualization: Taste Guidance in Co-cooking System for
Coexistence

Yongsoon Choi1, Adrian David Cheok1,2, Veronica Halupka1, Jose Sepulveda2, Roshan Peris2, Jeffrey Koh2, Wang Xuan2,
Wei Jun2, Abeyrathne Dilrukshi2, Yamaguchi Tomoharu3, Maiko Kamata3, Daishi Kato3 , and Keiji Yamada3
Keio-NUS CUTE Center in Keio University1, Keio-NUS CUTE Center in National University of Singapore2, and NEC C & C
Innovation Research Laboratories3

ABSTRACT
Currently we are developing a co-cooking system that helps users
to make similar tasting dishes, even though users may all be in
remote locations and potentially cooking at different times.
Because it is difficult to explain verbally or through written
media about cooking taste in the co-cooking interface system,
we’ve researched a flavor visualization module that guides unique
tastes with graphical information in the co-cooking interface
system.
To achieve this, firstly, we conducted literature studies to
clarify the flavor and visualization. We executed user studies to
extract linguistic vocabularies of flavor expressions and
sensibility vocabularies from each of the expression elements of
visualization and flavor. We then built connections between
sensibility vocabularies from the expression elements in
visualization and flavor through literature studies and user
interviews.
Based on this relationship grouping work, we could make a
relationship table of flavor and visualization expressions that
broadly contains the relationships between flavor expressions and
visual expressions. We could then realize a real-time working
prototype based on the relationship mapping table that we studied.
This flavor visualization can tackle the task of augmenting,
through cross modal interactions, feelings of tastes by visual
means.
In further research, we are thinking flavor visualization will
express individual cooking signatures, as derived from a personal
history of taste and physical cooking habits. Also, it can visualize
cooking tastes that express an individual’s unique taste signatures
for a more precise and emotionally involved remote co-cooking
experience. Through this, we are expecting possibilities for
fostering intimacy and family communication using the memory
triggers that come from tastes. We hope this will make us
emotionally feel coexistent in separated locations, and even
different times, by facilitating conversation and other sensory
communication with family and friends.


KEYWORDS: visualization, flavor, cooking signature, memory,
sensibility vocabulary

INDEX TERMS: H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND
PRESENTATION (e.g., HCI) (I.7)

1 INTRODUCTION
Family relationships are undergoing a rapid evolution as people’s
lifestyles grow increasingly busier in today’s society. Changes in
social relationships and the traditional family structure have
resulted in less physical interaction between family members,
making our lives more isolated.
Traditionally, the kitchen has always been a central place for
family members to interact while at home, with family
conversations and activities mainly taking place within the
vicinity of the kitchen and dining space. Accordingly, strength of
family bonds, social satisfaction and happiness could potentially
increase by creating a platform for family members to interact in
this space that has been deeply associated with safety and
communication since childhood, even if members are remotely
located.
The co-cooking system that we are developing will be a form of
future remote co-living technology that will be able to
accommodate the lifestyles of people in the coming decades. It
will help to promote and enrich family communication and supply
new multi-sensory experiences through augmented personal
expressions that connect people with the kitchen space.
One of the parts of our co-cooking research is a system that can
help users make similar-tasting dishes, even though users may all
be in separate locations and potentially cooking at different times.
The flavor visualization component that we are researching is
intended to help users make similar tasting dishes easily, by
comparing each other’s taste in real-time through graphical
information visualization. This can help users to recognize their
own unique tastes and cooking habits that are quite difficult to
explain verbally or through written media.
The flavor visualization component can tackle an unexplored
area of collaborative taste sharing by augmenting the cooking
experience with visual information.

2 RELATED STUDY
Studies to visualize flavor have been issued from design, food,
and agricultural business sectors in order to visualize more
standardized tastes and control the quality of tastes through
visualizations, and/ or to pass the feelings of taste through visual
graphical expressions.
In design fields especially, commercials and films have tried to
express the delicate modalities of taste through abstract visual and
aural expressions, and these works usually have focused more on
the expression of delicate taste feelings rather than guidance of
exact taste values. Higuchi.Inc, Japan has developed a taste
sensing system; TS-500Z that converts the taste of various
substances such as food and drugs into numerical data. It also
provides graphical visualizations to measure and to represent taste
data (Insent, 2008). These taste visualizations are more focussed
on representing exact measurement data of taste rather than
expression of taste feelings.
Hiyoshi, goodsoon96@cutecenter.org
53
IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality 2010
Arts, Media and Humanities Proceedings
13 -16 October, Seoul, Korea
978-1-4244-9341-8/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE