Girl eating sushi and being monitored
p2pnet news | TV:- If you’re and dining out at the Restaurant of the Future at the Dutch university of Wageningen in Holland and you get a creepy feeling someone’s peering over your shoulder, you won’t be mistaken.
1. GIRL EATING SUSHI AND BEING MONITORED
That comes up in a Reuters TV script centred on the university’s Big Brother restaurant, and, “We want to find out what influences people: colors, taste, personnel,” Reuters has Rene Koster, head of the Center for Innovative Consumer Studies, saying. “We try to focus on one stimulus, like light,” as overhead bulbs switched through green, red, orange and blue.
Researchers can, “direct cameras built into the ceiling of the restaurant to zoom in on individual diners and their plates,” says the story.
“They watch how people walk through the restaurant, what food catches their eye, whether they always sit at the same table and how much food they throw away.
University staff who want to eat at the Big Brother restaurant have to sign a consent form saying they don’t mind if researchers are watching while they eat.
“The 2.3 million Euro (today, $3,258,547) project is an initiative of Wageningen’s University’s ‘Center for Innovative Consumer Studies’(CICS), in partnership with Sodexho, Europe’s largest catering company, Kampri Group, a manufacturer of professional kitchen equipment, and Noldus Information Technology,” says the October 4 Reuters TV script.
“The restaurant of the future is, so to say, living laboratory, that’s a place where scientists together with private industry work on trying to understand why people behave as they do with regard to eating and drinking,” says Koster.
“The Restaurant of the Future consists of an experimental restaurant for studies of the effect of different assortments, presentation of products and use of counters, and buying and eating behavior of visitors, a restaurant kitchen in which new cooking equipment can be tested, and a range of sensory laboratory facilities in which researchers evaluate products on their sensory characteristics, with setups for physiological measurements,” it states.
Meanwhile, “Wageningen UR works on knowledge that helps us to create safe, healthy and above all tasty food,” says the university site, adding:
“Food that is healthy and safe for us, but also for our environment. Wageningen UR develops more efficient production and distribution methods in which wastage of natural raw materials is minimised. Wageningen UR also incorporates the newly created knowledge into its education programmes.”
Also See:
Reuters – “Big Brother” restaurant opens to study diners, October 15, 2007
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October 16th, 2007 at 10:18 am
sounds cool
October 16th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
This is just another experiment whose results will be sold to marketers. When the results are compiled and used, we won’t even be able to go out to eat in peace without some marketing gimmick pushed into our faces. It’s actually quite sad at what lengths companies will go to in order to squease an extra buck out of their customers.
This is the same situation that occurs when one goes to pick up groceries at the local Mao Mart. Merchandise is constantly rearranged so that customers have to wade through a bunch of stuff they don’t need to get to the stuff that they do need. Then they place all the candy and crap that kids are interested in at the long checkout lanes so that parents will be bugged relentlessly to buy even more unneeded crap.
The fact that is is becoming increasingly difficult to find a checkout counter actually manned by a cashier even adds to the frustration. It would be nice if Mao Mart wasn’t the only game in town in my locale.
October 17th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Mao Mart = Wal Mart? Why the name change?