SIGNATURE WORK
CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION 2022

Technologies have been widely adopted to enrich and define new eating experiences by either transforming people’s dining behaviors or providing background knowledge related to the food in a playful manner. Considering that the increasingly popular gesture-based interface is intuitive to interact with and gestures have great potential in promoting understanding, we utilized gesture interactions to design an interactive and educational dining experience called RiceJourney. Through gesture-based interaction, we aim to provide cultural background knowledge on four traditional ways to cook four different types of rice in China. Following the user-centered design, we prototyped gesture recognitions with the Leap Motion Controller in Processing and conducted a user study to understand the effectiveness and usability of the gesture-based interface and the designed gestures with 14 participants. Our study showed that this gesture-based interaction experience can update all participants’ understanding of rice and deepen 10 participants’ relatedness to rice. The results also revealed that participants preferred gestures congruent to their mental models in real life other than abstract representations. Our project contributes to the community by proposing an innovative framework and offering design implications for interactive dining experiences with educational purposes, where the outcome can be extended beyond rice and applied to other food ingredients.