Making, Publishing and Browsing Recipes in the Kitchen of the Future

A kitchen is not just a place of labor. Throughout history, the activity of preparing food has been accompanied social interaction and the development of social bonds. Our contribution is to demonstrate how a “Kitchen of the Future” can use technology to re-introduce such social interactions, and also enable entirely novel forms of communication mediated by computer. The Kitchen of the Futureis a computer-augmented kitchen environment that embeds various computing elements into a standard kitchen unit. It has four work areas comprising a sink, cooking stoves, and two preparation spaces. In each work area, we have installed a liquid crystal display (LCD), a camera, a microphone, and a foot switch, and have connected them to a computer system and the Internet. Our kitchen has possible applications including recording recipes, cooking assistance, and distant communication and education. In this paper, we will describe two applications to support generation of web-ready recipe pages, and to assist actual cooking using the recipes