Table 88 | MIT Reality Hack 2023

Inspiration

For many of us, food is a key signifier of our cultural identities and national origins. It’s where you find your communities, and comfort, celebrate holidays with your friends and families, and the list goes on. Our relationship to food and its presence in our lives denotes our social identities and national origins. The presence of food and the rituals of shared meals brought all of us together as a team. We want to share with you how we use Augmented Reality to tackle problems and find solutions for the issues that we care about.

What it does

Table88 is an Augmented Reality experience where players can “consume” food not physically but by “digesting” images, sounds, origins, and histories of their favorite foods. It is an entertaining, educational, accessible, and empowering Mixed Reality experience where users can ‘curate their own cuisine’ by selecting a ‘platter’ of virtual food that can satisfy needs for both familiar comfort foods as well as whet a player’s appetite for exploring new foodways.

My Team:

Ann Bennett: Producer

Natalie Fajardo : UI Designer

Tiffany (Szu-Yun) Wang:  UX Researcher

Qihang Fan:  Concept Designer, Programmer

Emily Xie:  Team Leader, Concept Designer, Programmer

• I designed a dining experience that integrates hand tracking in Unity with Lan Fan, allowing users to interact with a virtual lazy Susan and consume stories through their chosen dish. 
• Collaborated in Unity-based prototyping, actively contributing as both Lan Fan and I ventured into the realm of Augmented Reality for the first time.
• Optimized efficiency by sourcing and incorporating free assets from online resources.

How we built it

We attached the Zed Mini (camera enhancement, video passthrough) and Leap Motion (hand-tracking) to the Oculus Quest 2 headset.

Challenges we ran into

Compatibility of the device and hardware. We want to make hand-tracking work for free-hand interactions in AR. Oftentimes, the AR visuals will spawn in a different location where the user is at. It was hard for user to interact with game objects because of that.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We are proud that this is a community-based project. It is a two-way interactive experience and something that is important to all of us. Table88 supports the collection and sharing of food heritage and multicultural cuisine by providing an inclusive and accessible platform where players can explore foods from all over the world and they can also experience the cultural context, cooking traditions and personal stories associated with the diverse foods available in the Table88 Augmented Reality environment.

GitHub

We have an existing repo: https://github.com/Em925520/TableADA We did make a copy of the repo in the assigned repo but there are a few missing files.

Feel free to clone our project on github because it seems like our build doesn't work.