Why wear beer goggles when you can wear bing goggles?
Well, now you can, at least if you’re using Kittch’s new AR cooking mode to make chef Ming Tsai’s MingBings. Today Kittch, a culinary video community, announced they have teamed up with Qualcomm to integrate AR features into their cooking app, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The collaboration, done in partnership with technical design company Trigger, is being demoed this week at Augmented World Expo (AWE) in Santa Clara, California.
Kittch app users can access the Kittch AR cooking mode by plugging in AR glasses to a mobile phone and clicking the “view in kitchen” button. From there, users can follow interactive videos and recipes, set timers, and order ingredients via AR gesture control. The new feature was demoed by Ming Tsai and his MingBing recipe here.
Kittch & Qualcomm aren’t the first to show off AR-powered cooking for the home kitchen. Back in 2021, AR designer Lauren Cason went viral after spending an afternoon hacking together an AR cooking prototype to demonstrate to her father the power of augmented reality.
The Kittch demo shares some of the same features, including showing recipes and the ability to place visual timers in the designated places around the kitchen, but unlike Cason’s demo, the Kittch app lets you order ingredients.
It’s a cool feature for home cooks, but I’m still waiting for someone to create an AR app for the professional kitchen. A non-obtrusive AR tool made for busy cooks to monitor their different meals in process, access order info, check food inventory, and more would be a hugely valuable tool if done right. Get on it, AR people!
