This 3D-printed plate lets food droplets magically move without being touched
"Dancing Delicacies": Researchers at Monash University created a special plate enhanced with electrodes that moves liquid droplets around so diners can literally play with their food. Credit: Jialin Deng/Monash University. "Dancing Delicacies": Researchers at Monash University created a special plate enhanced with electrodes that moves liquid droplets around so diners can literally play with their food. Credit: Jialin Deng/Monash University. Imagine sitting down to a fine-dining meal in which droplets of sauce dynamically move basil leaves and other garnishes around the plate in preprogrammed patterns. Alternatively, you could choose to mix and match droplets to create your own flavor profile. That's the long-term goal of the so-called "Dancing Delicacies" computational food project, which brings together scientists from Monash University's Exertion Games Lab, Carnegie Mellon University's Morphing Matter Lab, and Gaudi Labs in Switzerland to explore innovative new ways to turn meals into interactive performance art. Their latest invention is a 3D-printed plate that uses electrical voltage to manipulate liquid droplets, according to a paper published as part of the 2023 Designing Interactive Systems Conference.
Cooking and eating is more than simply producing a dish and then facilitating energy intake," co-author Floyd Mueller of Monash told Forbes. It is about sharing, caring, crafting, slowing down and self-expression, and Dancing Delicacies aims to highlight these virtues at a time when they are often forgotten. The integration of food and computing will transform how we understand both computing and food as not two very different things, but a new frontier that combines the best of both."
Chefs have been working with this kind of innovation for years via the molecular gastronomy and molecular mixology movements, creating a "Flor de Caco" dessert in which a cocoa bean expands like a flower when exposed to hot chocolate sauce, for instance. Then there was that cocktail (the "Disco Sour") that changed color when blended with citrus, thanks to the incorporation of butterfly pea flower tea, which is a pH-sensitive ingredient. On the technology side, in 2014, MIT's Media Matters Lab experimented with a shape-changing fork that inflated depending on how fast a person ate. Another fork design was outfitted with electronics, in which an LED changed from red to green when users touched a food item with a conductive element, indicating how much water was in the food.