Audio-visual cocktail

Abstract

Food is essential for humans’ life. We communicate with and build strong bonds with each other through food. Food is also a means for relieving stresses from our life. Meanwhile, human computer interaction (HCI) just started to concentrate on creating meaningful user experience based on various digital media contents by coupling HCI with emerging technologies such as ubiquitous computing and tangible user interfaces. Although food has been a crucial experience for our life, food culture and food experience has not been major research topics in HCI and interaction design. This research considers our food experience as a significant resource that can provide unique experience to users in digital era. The research is about a series of frameworks for creating diverse digital media contents produced by food. Thus this thesis aims to propose, design, implement, and discuss various digital contents in order to enhance food’s positive aspects such as pleasure, creativity, and social-emotional bonds. The author suggests that the cocktail be appropriate food which can be readily connected to digital contents, and proposes several prototypes for performative, synaesthetic and edible digital contents in the context of cocktail bar. For this, the author introduced an approach based on cocktail recipes to the research, and applied a bottom-up methodology to the research. In such processes, the author designed a set of tangible user interfaces using cocktail-ware and glassware, and devised table-top interfaces from bar tables. Using these interfaces, bartenders or users can enjoy digital audio-visual contents with cocktails, and finally taste the audio-visual cocktails. In addition, the thesis examines the possibility of integrating audio and visual based on the analogies between sound and image by proposing and discussing audio-visual mappings enabling to unite audio and visual. Through the entire thesis, the author presents several new digital media contents with cocktail;...