Technology & Distant Dining
(Master Thesis)
Family that eats together stays together
Keywords
Designing Interactive Experience, Human Centred Design, Augmented Reality, Distant/Remote Dining
Technology & Distant Dining
Goal
“Exploring Possibilities to Improve Distant Dining Experience for Young Expats with their Loved Ones over Time and Space Gap Issues”
The goal of this master thesis was to understand what issues young expats face while dining with their loved ones over time and space gap and to construct a solution to see whether it can be addressed or improve the experience of distant dining.
Defining the Problem
The distant dining process is fairly limited for young expats with their loved ones. Time difference and the obvious space gap between each other makes it difficult for the the expats to eat meals with their loved ones daily or occasionally. The available technology, live WhatsApp video call are also not designed to cater the needs for distant dining process.
To keep our goal and research focused, we introduced a research question,
“Despite the time and space gap, how can technology be used to improve the current experience of distant dining for young expats with their loved ones?”
And, two sub-research questions as follows:
- “What are the habits around distant dining carried by young expats with their loved ones (family and friends) having a time zone difference of three or more hours?”
“How young expats use technology to distant dine with their loved ones (family and friends) where time zone difference is three or more hours?”
Time Gap Issue
This issue relates to time difference between the expat and its loved ones. For example, for an international student, it is breakfast time in The Netherlands at 9am and for their parents it is neither breakfast or lunch time in India at 12pm because of the 3.5 hours of time difference. Hence, due to this time gap, they can not have the same or different meals of the day together.
Space Gap Issue
This issue relates to the physical distance between the two diners as they are living in different parts of the world. Hence, the expats and their loved ones are not under the same roof, and both lack the physical presence of each other in the same room.
Exploratory Interviews
To find more information about the topic and its related issues, we carried out interviews with the target group. We found that time is not an issue for most as distant dining has become an occasional social activity carried out by expats and their loved ones. On the other hand users do felt the dire need of a system which could bring them physically closer. These issues and needs are presented in the pictures below.
The interviews resulted in an ideal distant dining scenario which the target group would love to experience. The ideal distant dining is similar to the dining setup people carry out under single roof however, expats believe that physical presence can not only be added using better video or 3D projection but added shared elements could also provide me connected experience.
Design Sessions
Design sessions allowed the users for the target group to be as innovative as possible for a solution which could enhance the distant dining experience between them and their loved ones. Participants during the design sessions were not forced to be limited by the technology currently present, this provided us with out of the box ideas for possible solutions. A few can be seen in the images.
Participants feedback on each other’s ideas we informative and were majorly focused on how Augmented Reality could be used to provide a better experience for distant dining with their loved ones. This resulted in development of an augmented reality distant dining application on an android smartphone as access to AR headsets like Hololens was not possible due to Covid-19 restrictions.
Augmented Reality Distant Dining Demo
The elements, game board, music player and television were shareable social lubricants, i.e. these interaction elements could be controlled (played, paused or moved in 3D space) by all the dinners connected over the internet. The point cloud was a livestream from a Kinect connected to a server hosted at in my house.
User Testing
The user testing consisted of Acceptance Scale and Interviews. Overall, the target group found Augmented distant dining to be more satisfied and useful when compared to video call which they usually use while distant dining. The 3D point cloud have seem to bring opposite diner in the same room as the expat and the added share social lubricants like game board, music player and television provide a better sense of connectivity over the physical distant and the time difference present between the two. As always every study has it own limitations which are discussed in detail in the report.
