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Abstract. We capture key factors of a group meal with communication and interface technologies to make a meal more enjoyable for diners who cannot be collocated. We determined three factors of a popular group meal, Chinese hotpot, that are essential for a group meal experience: interacting as a group with food, a central shared hotpot, and a feeling that others are nearby. We developed a prototype system to maintain these factors for an online meal with remote friends. Our technique is of interest to designers creating technology for isolated diners.

Healthy Shelf" is an interactive nutritional label system. User-centered design process was used to create the labels with HTML and JavaScript for deployment on kiosks attached to supermarket shelves. Users change the serving size on the nutritional labels and the labels then calculate nutritional values. The interactive labels also display comparisons of nutritional values. We evaluated a prototype of the system and found that participants liked the idea of using interactive nutritional labels while shopping and they make more accurate serving size.

We have built Tippy, a micro telepresence robot that allows a user to remotely project him or herself into another space, move around, and communicate via video and audio. An iPod Touch running Skype provides the robot with wireless video input and output capabilities and handles the movement commands from the remote user. In order to handle the robot's movement without implementing an additional medium, we inserted the control signals visually into the video and detect the signals via light sensors connected to the motor drive system. By optically coupling the mobile device display with the robot's drive-train control, we reduce the amount of software and hardware interfacing required for the end application.

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