One day when Lauren Cason was making a pie with her dad, it wasn’t long before talk turned to her job.
As an XR designer who helps big brands figure out how to use technology like augmented and virtual reality, Cason explained to her father how augmented reality glasses like the Snap Spectacles work. As she was talking, Cason had an epiphany: she could make a prototype to show him.
“One of the things that’s really cool about the Spectacles is that you can prototype stuff with them very quickly,” Cason said during an interview with The Spoon. “So we worked on the pie, and then I spent the afternoon putting the prototype together, and I made a video.”
The video, which you can see above, shows the view of someone working in the kitchen with an AR lens designed to help them cook. The lens puts relevant information such as cooking temperature and countdown timers over items cooked on the stove and in the oven. Cason also created the ability to pull up a recipe by touching a specific area within the cook’s view and even had a note from her dad appended to the dough roller reminding her not to over-roll the dough.
As soon as Cason put the video on Twitter, it blew up. People loved it, including chefs, who told her they would use something like this in their restaurants.
“They said, ‘I don’t know if I would really use this at home, but I would totally use this in my industrial kitchen,'” Cason said.
Cason also got helpful feedback on other aspects of the video. For example, in the first version, a recipe would pop up when the cook tapped on the microwave and a recipe showed up, but some felt the information would obscure the view of the oven as the cook looked around.
“Some folks gave me the feedback that it might be a safety issue if you can obscure the cooktop and the flame area with the recipe,” Cason said. “So I changed it.”
When Cason bakes cookies in the second prototype version of her AR lens, not only does the recipe stick in one place on the wall, but it also includes visual placement guidance on the cookie sheet to help the baker evenly space the cookie dough.
Talking to Cason, my mind began to envision all sorts of ways in which augmented reality could be used as a cooking assistant both in the consumer and professional kitchen alike. Our talk also confirmed what I already suspected: augmented reality, of all the broader technologies that are being grouped under the term metaverse, is the most mature and ready to be useful in real world situations like our kitchens.
When I asked Cason about the metaverse, she said that it’s an interesting time for both the technology and the term itself. However, she also expressed cautious skepticism, especially when it came to big companies like Facebook’s embracing the technology.
“One of my old bosses gave a really good talk about the term metaverse and he said that Facebook was ‘cookie licking’ right now.” Cason said. She explained that the term cookie-licking is when a company treats a new technology space like a plate of cookies, only instead of eating the cookie, Facebook is essentially just picking one up, licking it, and putting it back on the plate.
They’re saying “I’m not going to eat the cookie right now, but I don’t want anybody else to eat the cookie either,” Cason said.
For now, Cason doesn’t concern herself with what cookies Mark Zuckerberg is choosing to lick on the metaverse cookie sheet. Instead, she just plans on continuing to keep iterating on her prototype so her dad – and maybe even a professional chef or two – can bake cookies in the real world with a bit of help from AR.
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