In November 12, 2019 – Magic Leap has announced that the company’s first-ever food partner, kitchen and home brand, Food52, is bringing its recipes, step-by-step instructions, ingredient lists, and food photography to the Magic Leap One spatial computing device. Food52 chose to work with Magic Leap for its first step into the spatial web, and to offer its community and users a new way to experience the world of Food52.
Recently, the Food52 community has been co-designing kitchen and home products with the brand’s commerce team as seen in their direct-to-consumer Five Two line. Now with Magic Leap One, Food52’s community will see their recipes brought to life in a new spatial cooking experience.
According to the company, Food52’s Product and UX team interviewed and surveyed thousands of home cooks to find out their pain points in a modern kitchen as part of the user-centric redesign of the company’s recipe pages earlier this year. It was discovered that home cooks were fed up with constantly switching back and forth between ingredients and preparation steps on a device, especially with unwashed hands. The Food52 team partly solved the issue for phones and tablets by providing a toggle to display ingredients and prep steps in parallel. However, the company felt that the best, truly hands-free option was to use the Magic Leap One.
“From day one we knew the ideal experience would be a deconstructed recipe appearing right in the places you need it in the kitchen,” explained Ryan Charles, Chief Product Officer at Food52. “And the idea of extending our existing web platform versus fully developing a native app was appealing as our first foray into spatial computing. Magic Leap made that possible, and actually fairly simple.”
When establishing how users might engage with the Food52 website on Magic Leap One, the company found that by allowing images and videos on recipes to become interactive objects that could be placed spatially, the website itself quickly became spatial. Food52 further improved the user experience by adding a virtual timer and interactive 3D visualizations of cooking tools.
The Food52 website can be viewed on the Magic Leap One’s Helio web-browser, and provides users with a hands-free cooking experience that brings to life the kitchen of the future. With spatially placed ingredient lists, step-by-step instructions, video walkthroughs, and photos of the finished dish, users benefit from a web-based recipe without having to constantly touch a phone or tablet device. Instead, Food52 readers can seamlessly look up from chopping vegetables and have the next preparation step at the ready, floating at eye level.
Charles added: “We wanted to stretch the imagination of our community of home cooks, and I think we’ve achieved that today”.
Image credit: Magic Leap/Food52
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Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix. With a background in research and report writing, he has been covering XR industry news for the past seven years.