Fabrication

My doctoral research investigates how computational food fabrication can shape how culinary experiences unfold over time. It covers anticipation before the first bite, changes in flavor and texture during chewing, and reflection that informs future meals.

ChewTect explores temporal food texture design through computational molding.

TastePrint is a 3D food printing system that airbrushes liquid seasoning between printed layers, so that taste can be distributed layer by layer within a single piece of food.

OleoCircuit explores edible conductive gels that can be integrated into food. It combines oil-based oleogels and water-based hydrogels with edible conductive fillers. Changing the oil-to-water ratio adjusts texture and fabrication properties. The study demonstrates extrusion-based food printing and conductive traces integrated with chocolate. It investigates materials and fabrication methods for incorporating sensing elements into food.

We present interiqr, a method that utilizes the infill parameter in the 3D printing process to embed information inside the food that is difficult to recognize with the human eye. Our key idea is to utilize the air space or secondary materials to generate a specific pattern inside the food without changing the model geometry. As a result, our method exploits the patterns that appear as hidden edible tags to store the data and simultaneously adds them to a 3D printing pipeline. Our contribution also includes the framework that connects the user with a data-embedding interface through the food 3D printing process, and the decoding system allows the user to decode the information inside the 3D printed food through backlight illumination and a simple image processing technique. Finally, we evaluate the usability of our method under different settings and demonstrate our method through the example application scenarios.