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美国 纽约 Intro： Flavor Five Studio LLC is a New York-based, multimedia creative studio and tech development firm exploring the intersection of food and mixed reality. The studio specializes in producing multidimensional, immersive gastronomy experiences. Using proprietary software, Flavor Five Studio has created a unique way to enhance the sensory experience of mixed-reality storytelling by incorporating taste.
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We Tried the New Virtual Reality Dining Experience at the James Beard House. Here’s What Happened.
As I walked toward the hallowed James Beard House in Manhattan’s West Village, I wondered what the “Dean of American Cookery” himself would think of what I was about to undertake: eating a meal while immersed in virtual reality world. Beard is credited with being the forefather of American cooking and is known as one of the world’s first “foodies,” but he also lays claim to hosting the first television food program, back in 1946 on the then-emerging medium. If Beard was ready to embrace the newest medium of the time, it seems fair to assume he’d be supportive of testing out the latest frontier in technology and dining. Inspired by the 1932 Italian book, The Futurist Cookbook, artist Mattia Casalegno came up with the idea of virtual reality dining in 2018, launching Aerobanquets RMX with experiences in China and South Korea. For the U.S. debut, he teamed up with New York restaurateur Roni Mazumdar and chef Chintan Pandya, both of critically acclaimed Rahi and Adda Indian Canteen, and with the James Beard Foundation. The $125 seven-course meal, which launched in November 2019 and recently got extended through January 2020, deviate from the typical dinner hosted at the James Beard House quite a bit. They are just one hour long, feature a maximum of four diners per session, and have time slots available from 12 to 9 pm. Still, I had almost no idea what to expect. And upon entering the townhouse last Friday at 1 pm, I was even more perplexed. Instead of the usual hustle and bustle of the house, it was empty save for two other guests in the front room and our host, Antonio, who proceeded to talk to us about safety rather than food. I’ve never had to be instructed on how to eat before, but this adventure would require some direction. Aside from basics like what the headgear would feel like and instructions not to flail our arms too wildly (while also encouraging us to explore the manipulatable, 360-degree world), he presented us with a stubby little stand with small plate perched atop. All our food would be served on this custom-made, 3-D printed plastic vessel, featuring a small lip to help guide food into our mouths when we wouldn’t be able to see it. After a quick tour of the townhouse we had an initial course of small delicious bites—the only ones we would actually get to see, including a paneer tart with chili and chicken tikka masala with mint puree. When the previous group came down the stairs abuzz from their experience, I quickly covered my ears. Little did I know that nothing could prepare me for this experience—not even reading this article, which admittedly contains several spoilers. Finally, the three of us are led up four flights of stairs to a tiny room in a part of the house I’d never seen before. The all-black space has a simple round table with four office-type rolling chairs and a few spots marked with Xs made from masking tape. Massive black helmets with goggles hang from wires and there are several open laptops. It looked more like a movie set than a dining room. My personal handler fits me with my headgear and instructs me to look at my hands. A strange, digitized version of them appear before me, moving as I wave them in front of my face. Suddenly, I am plunged into a virtual version of the main dining room at the James Beard House. Trying to orient myself, I stare straight ahead, until I remember this is a 360-degree world that I can crane my neck to see. This first scene turns out to be the only one rooted in reality. The landscape shifts to an endless checkered floor with a table and a dish of digitized food that resembles a red ball. I realize I’m supposed to reach for it. I feel the vessel in my hands and lift it to my lips. The bite is small, sweet, and juicy. An apple maybe? Before I can fully wrap my brain around the taste, the scene changes to a black space with utensils, plates, and glasses floating around me. I can grab them, move them, and make them glow. As I reach out again, something is put into my hand and a voice (Top Chef’s Gail Simmons, to be precise) says “It’s so dark in here, what is that?” Of course, I have to eat it. Here, there’s no refusing something because I don’t want it—after all, I don’t even know what it is. It feels too large in my mouth and I feel self-conscious about what I must look like. It tastes like fish, with an adornment of some kind of fruit leather. Without knowing what it is, I try to focus on whether it pleases my palate. The answer is yes. As the meal progresses, the scenery around me does, too. All of the scenes are surreal, with things like giant fruit bouncing around a bright background, and a graphic deer floating in space (really). Several times when I reach for something I slam into the table or swat a person. Sometimes, I close my eyes for a few seconds to focus on the food bites and what they might be. Every once in a while, Simmons’ voice returns, saying oddly esoteric things like “I think it tastes like a whistle through a wind lock blowing through a door lock on a cold afternoon.” Er, okay Gail. One memorable scene features a swirl of beans, chickpeas, capers, 25 red cherries, 12 fried potato chips, and a sip of Barolo (or so I’m told by Simmons). The food appears and I eat it. I actually dislike this bite, which tastes kind of like spicy falafel to me. It’s dry, and I find myself wishing for that Barolo. Suddenly, a bottle pouring white liquid from a moon-like object appears. I’m parched. The final scene is a world populated by massive Greek-style statues reclining on a liquid-like surface. I feel slightly dizzy and hot, and my eyes hurt. A vessel appears and I take the bite, which is depicted like a pink and red orb with small stalks growing out of it, almost like a waving anemone. It’s cold—strawberry sorbet? And pieces of seaweed, maybe? It’s refreshing, an excellent palate cleanser with a strange texture. The water rises around me, making my feel like I’m about to drown. It keeps rising until everything is black. And…scene. Our headsets are removed and the three of us are speechless and jabbering at the same time. A final bite of chocolate ice cream and water is served before we’re led into another room where Mazumdar and Pandya await. (The two are not at every meal but there’s always a debrief following the experience.) We discuss how our brains process taste when we’re surrounded by a different world than what we expect. How preconceived notions and choice affect what we eat and how we taste. The two admit to using narration and images that don’t match up with the actual food served, simply to reframe things, and well, mess with our heads. “As soon as you see a dish, subconsciously your mind will start talking to you about that dish,” says Pandya. They reveal that, spoiler alert—one bite containing Impossible Meat is served during a scene where instruments made out of meat float around, in an effort to make us think we are eating meat. This didn’t quite work on me (I thought it tasted vaguely of seafood), but one of my dining companions says he thought he ate pork. I had some minor quibbles. I was still hungry after the seven small bites (According to Pandya, each one is half-inch by half-inch), which after throwing down $125 and using up my lunch hour is not ideal. I longed for a drink component (which the team says they are working on). And the room is definitely too small. In the end, it was an incredible dining experience that I’ve definitely never had before—pretty hard to come by these days. Ideal for adventurous diners willing to set aside their preconceptions and put their life—or at least a meal—entirely in someone else’s hands Before we leave, Mazumdar waxes poetic about how this technology could evolve. “Our goal is to build a platform so that one day chefs and artists can collaborate on dynamic environments. The same way how today we see people building restaurants, tomorrow can we build virtual worlds where you can have incredible meals?” As I leave, I’m handed a printed menu. It’s strange to see a list of foods I supposedly just ate and my accuracy rate is pretty abysmal…but I won’t spoil it. Source: Robb Report. Author: Devorah Lev-Tov, published on: Jan.16, 2020. Original article link: Click here
VR DINING DEBUTS AT JAMES BEARD HOUSE
For those who have had the pleasure of dining there, the nondescript door to the James Beard House can be a portal into another world. Stepping in off the West Village streets, the dark wood trim and iconic pineapple wallpaper of this 19th century space harken back to another era of New York luxury. The townhouse was once the private residence of James Beard, the “Dean of American Cookery,” and now serves as the site for year-round culinary programs that promote the breadth and depth of American cuisine through the eponymous foundation. As we close out 2019 and usher in a new decade, this site offers a bridge into another culinary future, a virtual one orchestrated by the artist Mattia Casalegno through his Aerobanquets RMX. Inspired by the 1932 social document The Futurist Cookbook by Italian artists Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Casalegno conceived of a virtual reality dining experience, “to create an experience in which the audience can focus on the perception of taste itself, without preconceived notions of how dining should look like,” he explained in an interview with MOLD. Exploring ways to design for the senses is the foundation for Casalgeno’s artistic practice. Virtual reality as a medium for his work appealed to him because of its immersive nature. “In VR you can manipulate space, visuals and music in very dramatic ways,” he shared, “and I noticed that taste is still an unexplored field in VR.” The first iteration of Aerobanquets RMXwas the result of a research and creation residency at the Chronus Art Center in Shanghai in 2018; a collaboration with chef Flavio Giglioni Carestia of Toscanini in Amsterdam. A second iteration at the FoodHack Festival this past June in Gwangju, South Korea, brought Casalegno in collaboration with the acclaimed New York City-based chef Chintan Pandya of Adda, whom he also worked with for the current iteration. The US debut of the project has the chef and television personality Gail Simmons narrating the diner’s journey through absurdist passages ruminating on a range of topics—from ingredients, the sensorial experience, GMOs and the seasons—in an upside down world. “The Futurists saw food as the ultimate promise of optimism. Every society and era has a distinctive way of preparing and consuming food, and they were among the first artists to embrace food in relation to the technological transformations of modernity, viewed at the time as a positive development,” Casalegno explains. “Today, the application of technology to food has very different implications: genetically modified fruit, laboratory-engineered meat, chemical supplements, so I wanted to emphasize the contrast between that utopian vision and what is going on these days. The narrator is this figure stuck in between two worlds, skeptical about what ‘people above’ are doing to the world below.” Vocalizing the character of Persephone, Simmons becomes a guide between virtual environments, navigating the above and below worlds. After a brief introduction in the receiving room at the James Beard House, four intrepid diners are escorted up the winding stairs of the townhouse, past the famed dining room with its period charm—replete with chartreuse green walls and oversized portrait of Beard—and into a small white room with four swivel chairs arranged around a common table, lit by the neon glow of screens. The room could be anywhere in the world, and its anonymity is a function of stripping out expectations for the dining experience. After adjusting VR headsets on each participant, the narrative begins to play with the first scene situating the diner at the James Beard House’s dining room, just a few floors below. In Aerobanquets RMX, the diner is fixed to their seat, a passive participant in unfolding virtual worlds around them. There are small moments of interaction—in one scene you can “play” virtual instruments made of cuts of meat floating in a soundscape designed by the producer and artist DJ Spooky—and see one’s hands rendered through digital filters throughout the experience. This is important because beyond designing the environments, Casalegno designed a custom vessel for serving and tasting each course. This vessel—a cross between a hand bowl and plinth for tasty morsels—can be tracked in the VR experience. It’s organic shape allows the diner to feel out the tableware with both hands and orient it successfully to one’s lips, tipping back the head and opening one’s mouth to deliver a single bite in each environment. Each morsel is visualized in the experience in unexpected and unusual ways. The dissonance between the virtual representation of the morsel and the ways that one experiences it as the flavor, texture and mouthfeel is processed in the mouth is the real magic of Aerobanquets RMX and the VR dining experience. “My proposition was: how do you visualize taste? What is the shape, the color of a flavor?,” Casalegno explained. His answer was to create a system for categorizing ingredients and flavor combinations that would translate into colors and textures for his 3D models. Using Niki Segnit’s Flavor Thesaurus as a guide, Casalegno wrote a program that would visualize sensorial elements by generating data-sets of points, lines, meshes and textures based on flavor combination categories like meaty, earthy, mustardy and floral fruity. In virtual reality, the ways that we experience scent, texture and flavor have an outsized impact on our experience, and as I learned for VR dining, our emotional connection to food. Without “seeing” a dish and engaging in the physical space, our expectations around the experience of flavor can’t be established. For the restaurateur Roni Mazumdar, executive producer for Aerobanquets RMX at James Beard House, this was the power of virtual reality dining. “What happens when you change everything that you perceive your food by?,” he poses. “This is a new media and new language for dining.” How do South Asian flavors translate when visual cues and environmental contexts remove any preconceived notions? For one, the flavor profile of each bite, its texture and mouthfeel, become charged eliciting waves of confusion and delight. As a diner, I experienced a disconnect between my perceived textures and the visual cues generated by the software. The exception was the last course, a falooda composed of vermicelli, basil seeds, pistachio and rose that had equally playful filaments protruding from its virtual counterpart. This dissonance was often more confusing than revelatory. Although Aerobanquets is a huge leap into the nascent space of VR dining, the term “dining” still seems like a misnomer. Ultimately, dining is a social act that brings people together to share a common experience. As VR dining progresses into an undefined future, discovering new ways for people to find common ground together in unchartered gustatory landscapes will be critical to its success. Source: Mold. Author: LinYee Yuan, published on: Dec.10, 2019. Original article link: Click here
This virtual reality dining experience is trippy – and might be the future of restaurants
The James Beard House is a circa-1844 townhouse in the West Village, its creaky floors filled with oil paintings and homages to the greatness of the culinary center’s namesake food writer and cook, who once lived there. The historic setting, where chefs from all over the country come to prepare their finest cuisine, is an unlikely yet fitting place for a futuristic, trippy art-meets-dining meal. In December, the Beard House hosted Aerobanquets RMX, a virtual reality experience wherein diners wear headgear that transports them to a Dali-esque landscape, where they encounter food in ways that feel stranger than Alice in Wonderland stumbling across a tea party. The exhibit, by Italian artist Mattia Casalegno in partnership with restaurateur Roni Mazumdar and chef Chintan Pandya of New York restaurants Rahi and Adda, raises questions that linger long after you experience it: Was that a meal or performance art? Is this the future of dining out? And an even more fundamental one: What is eating all about, anyway? All the uncertainty starts when you and several other diners are seated in a darkened room on spinnable chairs, goggles strapped to your head. You’ve been coached on how to eat in the virtual reality world you’re about to enter – just line up your fingers along a sensor on the vessel in which the dishes arrive, and then hinge your neck back and tip the seven one-bite “courses” into your mouth. But that instruction doesn’t quite prepare you for what’s coming. Your hands appear as strange, robotic appendages that wiggle unfamiliarly as you move them. Look down, and your legs have disappeared. It’s delightful – plates and spoons fly around your head, and when you reach out to touch them ... poof! They slide out of reach and disappear. And at times it veers into unsettling, as when tendrils growing up from the ground (Are they tentacles? Roots?) at first seem benign, but slowly envelop you as a spider might surround its prey with silk threads. A murky mushroom forest grows beneath you. There’s no straightforward plot to the affair, but food themes abound, as well as a motif of Persephone, the goddess of nature who was doomed to spend part of the year in the underworld – a pattern that explained the seasons and crop cycles to the ancient Greeks. “The underworld looks so much like the upper world these days,” intones a resigned-sounding narrator – and if the voice sounds familiar, it’s because it’s Bravo’s “Top Chef” judge Gail Simmons. “And either way, no matter what, once you eat something, it’s gone.” The food that arrives on floating platters resembles nothing you’ve ever ingested – that is, unless you treat science fairs as buffets. Tiny orbs circulate some bites, others look like spiky sea urchins – but such forms defy what lands on the tongue. The dishes, revealed afterward on a menu card, play off the visual and aural cues, often in surprising ways. In one scene, slabs of meat morph into musical instruments as they descend all around you. “Think of the first time you bit your lip,” Simmons invites, immediately conjuring up ideas of flesh, consumed – and even a repellent notion of cannibalism. The corresponding bite does taste of meat, though you learn later it’s actually Impossible meat, the new high-tech plant-based substitute, served with goat cheese and chickpeas. At one point, a taste of slippery vermicelli noodles, accented by notes of pistachio and rose, echoes the scene, in which you are submerged in a sea. (I detected the pasta as I ate, but the flavors remained elusive until I saw the menu card.) And while all of this has a giddily transporting feel, Casalegno’s goal isn’t merely entertainment. Nor is it to offer a meal. He’s after something more. “Because we live our lives more and more detached from the physicality of reality – through our phones, we are detaching ourselves from the reality of life,” he says. “I wanted to work to bring us back to the realness, and eating is one of the most real things you can work with.” Casalegno, a native of Italy, was inspired by the “Futurist Cookbook,” a 1932 manifesto in which the Italian avant-garde reimagined cuisine and its sensory components. Whereas the Futurists incorporated perfume into meals and favored food in sculptural form, Casalegno turned to the medium of virtual reality to upend the experience of eating – divorcing the sense of taste from that of sight. “Anytime we go to a restaurant, we have some ideas of how we should eat and what the things we are eating will taste like, whether it’s meat, fish or vegetables,” he says. “In our brains, we are already experiencing the taste. I wanted to use virtual reality to reframe the experience – in our brains, we are blanked out and we can start from scratch in a way.” Another inspiration, the Persephone myth, he says, is meant as a commentary about how out of touch most modern diners are with the seasons, with the agricultural system that underpins their food. And even if all this is high-concept art, could it also be the future of fine dining? Avant-garde dining is nothing new. At temples of high cuisine like the late El Bulli in Spain, Copenhagen’s famed Noma and even Washington’s Minibar, chefs use art and science to tinker with traditional forms of food and methods of ingesting them. Molecular gastronomy’s foams, liquid-nitrogen-fueled concoctions and liquids delivered via syringe transform recognizable foods into mind-bending dishes. Mitchell Davis, chief strategy officer for the James Beard Foundation, who first invited the artists to offer their sensory-dining experience in the historic setting, says VR dining has much in common with those restaurants. “This is in that family of experiences, but at El Bulli, the technology happens in the kitchen, where hundreds of people worked really hard with science and equipment to change your perceptions of food and how you ate,” Davis says. “Here, the food is regular food, but all the technology is happening as you get it.” High-tech toying with reality has long been interesting to restaurateurs, chefs and diners. “Dark dining” – where adventure seekers dine in total darkness, with waiters often using night-vision technology to handle the food – has been around for two decades. City Social bar in London offers “augmented reality” cocktails, which appear with all kinds of effects when viewed through a smartphone app. Virtual reality technology, long the playground of shoot-’em-up gamers, offers restaurateurs yet another dimension to alter. Some have already begun deploying it. In Tokyo, the restaurant Tree by Naked incorporates VR into some of its courses. Ibiza’s Sublimotion – which at around $2,000 a head is one of the world’s most expensive restaurants – uses the technology, along with video projection, laser light shows and DJs, to create a “gastronomic performance.” For now, Casalegno doubts that just any restaurant could simply add a VR experience to its menu; for starters, it would be technically difficult to pull off in an existing dining room, and the equipment is expensive. But he’s exploring the idea of creating a stand-alone VR dining space for collaborations with chefs. Davis hopes the exhibit – and VR dining generally – offers more than just a novel outing for bored eaters looking for the latest gimmick. “I don’t want people to be so tired with the restaurant experience that it’s like we have to poke them,” he says. “Like, ‘Oh, we’ve done that, let’s eat in a balloon’ or something. I really want people to look at food differently.” Source: The Durango Herald. Author: Emily Heil, published on: Aug.12, 2020. Original article link: Click here