AR-Bot as kitchen assistant

Three students from HAW Hamburg and the University of Hamburg have developed an augmented reality prototype. The "Foodbot" can detect food via smartphone camera and then offer the user suitable recipe ideas. Foodboom supported the students in their three-month project work.

Everyone knows the situation: the joyful return home is followed by a disappointing look in the fridge, which once again offers very little. A few eggs here, a bit of vegetables there, the choice of food is small. And in general: how can the various ingredients be combined into just one dish? The augmented reality extension developed by students Linh Do, Agata Strausa and Victor Petersen for the Foodboom-The app is intended to provide the answer to this question and help with the processing of individual ingredients into a finished dish.

Recipes at the touch of a button

The respective foods can be scanned in the application using a smartphone camera before the prototype makes suitable recipe suggestions based on the registered ingredients. In this way, the foodbot should enable the user to cook quickly, easily and well with just a few ingredients. The app extension is the result of three months of project work that took place as part of the first VR Prototyping Lab by Nextmedia.Hamburg and Nextreality.Hamburg.

When it came to recognising and labelling the ingredients, the challenge was to bring the possibilities of AR in line with machine learning. Parallel to the prototype development, the production of new recipes was also started, which were developed especially for the application.

Foodboom founder Sebastian Heinz is more than satisfied with the participation in the programme and the work of the students and underlines: "The VR Prototyping Lab was the ideal opportunity for us to open our doors to young developers and to benefit from their innovative and creative drive for tech-savvy projects like this one."

The working group was the only team in the VR Prototyping Lab to focus on augmented reality, as this technology can be used directly on the smartphone and is therefore suitable for integration into their own app.

Source: it-zoom / Image: Foodboom