The Augmented Chef

1. The Augmented Chef A Projected Touchscreen Kitchen Computer The problem: current kitchen computers rely on an interface that doesn’t work when the user has dirty fingers from cooking. They take up valuable countertop space also are very limited in functionality, offering only basic recipe interaction and little to no other features. The solution: Using a projector and camera, the countertop is turned into a touchscreen. By integrating the Web, search, and a recipe store, the kitchen is finally brought into the 21st century. A button based GUI is projected onto a countertop. As the user moves their finger to tap buttons, a camera mounted on top of the projector and pointing down at the countertop captures that movement and does gesture recognition to tell what button is pressed. This eliminates the need for the extra space a traditional touchscreen requires and provides a touchscreen that can be used with dirty fingers.

2. Main Features: -Recipe Library: View a huge bank of food and drink recipes and share or trade them with your friends. Sort by main ingredient, estimated price of dish, difficulty of cooking, and taste. Upload your own recipes by placing the physical recipe on the countertop and the camera will capture it, perform OCR, and index it for searching. Mockup of Home screen. This is projected onto the countertop. Filter recipes by ingredient to exclude all results that have a certain allergen the user is sensitive to. By connecting to the users home network, the device can print a shopping list. If there are no shared printers, the list can be sent to the users phone. All recipes allow rating for quick identification of good recipes. -Tutorials: Certain recipes may be bundled with an instructional video of a professional chef demonstrating how to make that dish. The video is shown at the corner of the projection so the user can work and watch the video at the same time. Simple tutorials like how to julienne a potato can be given by recognizing that a potato is sitting on the countertop and then projecting lines where it should be cut.

3. Other features: -Timer: Simple set of timers to keep track of each thing that is cooking. -Settings: Control how the device connects to the Internet, calibrate the touchscreen, and perform other tasks to tweak how the interface appears and functions. -Store: download recipes from websites like epicurious.com and food.com. Restaurants and cookbook publishers can also sell individual recipes or entire cookbooks. Comparable to an iTunes for food. -Music: Stream music through the onboard speakers from sites like Pandora, or listen to your own collection. -Health/Diet Tracking:If a user wants to go on a diet, they can download specific meal sets from the store that adhere to that diet. Examples include Gluten free and Weight Watchers. -Recipe Flow: Recipes automatically tell the user when to perform time dependent steps (like preheating the oven) so that the meal will be done at the predicted time.

4. Technical Details The computer that drives the interface can be onboard (using a Gumstix computer or other embedded device running Linux) or it can be remote (where the projector is essentially a wireless monitor). Further prototyping must be completed before the decision of onboard/remote computation can be made. The device is networked over wireless or wired ethernet to fetch new recipes, download instructional videos, look up nutrition facts, and can also be updated with new firmware over the Internet. It can print shopping lists if the user has a home network set up and is sharing a printer, or it can just send the list over the Internet connection to their smartphone. Onboard I/O ports: -Ethernet -Audio out (also has small onboard speakers) -Wireless radio for 802.11/b/g/n -USB host (for moving media and recipes) Gumstix embedded Linux platform

5. Market: The primary target market for this product is single men between the ages of 18-40. Single men are more likely to want to improve their cooking. Another large target market is culinary schools. A modified version of the device could teach students cooking techniques and give help when needed. Finally, middle class and above families who often cook their meals or who are interested in learning how to cook are targeted. It is expected that the vast majority of consumers who purchase this product will only buy one, in the same way that they only buy one stove, one dishwasher, etc. Preliminary cost estimates place the sale price at $400-$700 per unit.