In the Living Cookbook project we investigate the potential of display technology to support the social character of cooking.
The Living Cookbook aims to make people's cooking experiences recordable and
shareable, so as to preserve cultural and social roots on the one hand, and
stimulate cultural and generational fertilization on the other. Instead of
simply exchanging written instructions, we capture the whole cooking process
with annotated audio and video and make it available for others so that they
can asynchronously reproduce the dish.
It can be used to record a recipe (i.e. record the whole cooking process)
or to play-back a recipe (i.e. play-back the whole process and follow it).
In order to support both the recording and play-back mode with the same interface,
the general conceptual model of a tape or video recorder was adopted.
The
User Interface of the Living Cookbook is a client application running on a
tablet PC mounted on a kitchen cabinet. It is implemented in Macromedia Flash
and connected to a server implemented in Java, which in turn controls a camera
for recording video, and a video projector for playing back the video. Via
the client interface a user can insert new recipes, choose already inserted
recipes and control video recording and playback. The video is projected onto
a wall above the counter in order to provide a good view and still keep the
counter clear of devices.
The Living Cookbook is also presented in a short Video.