Feb
11
2025
A great meal or a glass of wine among friends are the experiences we covet and treasure. The setting, the quality of the food or wine, and the company help define the occasion, but typically, these are good experiences. Such experiences, generally, don’t need technology or further design to improve them. In fact, there is a risk that one might introduce something that could diminish the quality of these memorable occasions. This skeptical approach to what is known as sensory dining has served us well when exploring the addition of multi-sensory technology to experiences that involve food and/or drink. We’ve learned a lot over the years about these types of experiences, and we can bring new and improved hardware and software tools and design techniques to these sensory dining experiences.
So, what could or should be added to elevate these types of experiences? What would make dining or drinking more engaging, pleasurable, and memorable? First off, we need to understand what makes these experiences satisfying in the first place. It is pretty simple: it is about the attributes of the setting or space, the quality and presentation of food or wine, and the conversations between guests that help define these occasions.
Technology can be used to alter the setting. We’ve all seen projection-mapped, sensory dining experiences (or have participated in them). Visual effects and sounds can create new and interesting settings, which can help create immersive environments. They can help set a mood and create a sense of space or immersion. They can also compensate for uninspiring spaces without windows or uninteresting architecture or decor.
A good visual and auditory program can deepen conversations or even move people emotionally by altering and varying the visual environment. These programs work best when a strong, cogent narrative and compelling media move the participants through a story. However, these larger projection-mapped spaces often project lower-fidelity imagery, and interactivity can be challenging to implement. Most are chock full of cool animations and “special effects,” but do they make the visitor feel special? These programs would benefit from more active participation; eating a meal or drinking wine isn’t visitor participation; those activities happen regardless of the technology. Ideally, visitors would be part of the story and could shape it somehow; they wouldn’t just be receivers of sensory information.
Ideum has developed over a hundred interactive exhibits with visual, auditory, touch, and movement qualities over its' 25-year history. Only a few have implemented taste and smell. However, these experiences have always stood out as novel, exciting, and ground-breaking, with so few examples out in the world. The tools and techniques for developing these sensory experiences have improved over the last several years. It is an exciting development because a new generation of sensory experiences can be explored.
Last month, we released The Tasting Table, designed explicitly for high-fidelity interactive experiences with beverages or food. Over the years, significant improvements in the hardware and supporting software have been made. For example, the display for the Tasting Table is optically bonded, creating a strengthened surface impervious to spillage and an improved viewing angle. Tangible Engine, an object-recognition software package developed by Ideum, allows beverages (and other items) to be identified. We’ve been working on this software for almost a decade. These improvements make tasting experiences more straightforward to develop, responsive, and long-lasting.
Our Wine Experience software and Sparkling module were developed for the Tasting Table using Tangible Engine. We plan to create new tasting modules and are ready to support other developers who want to use the Tasting Table as a platform for sensory dining experiences. The Tasting Table’s high-resolution 4K display with 80 touchpoints allows for the development of compelling tasting experiences, ones that allow for much more visitor interaction than could be supported in a projection-based environment.
While a touch table-based experience lacks the immersive qualities many projection environments provide, these are not mutually exclusive technologies. Projection could be combined with these highly interactive touch tables. The interactive nature of the tables allows us to explore taste and receive complex and detailed feedback from visitors. Taste is personal and can be expressed and shared with your companions. What you taste is essential. What others taste is meaningful; these are moments for conversation, reflection, and growth. At its core, sensory dining is about taste.
Once you start talking about taste and engage visitors by making them participants, all sorts of things can emerge. When discussing wine, we often talk about the terroir, the natural environment where wine is produced, including the soil, climate, and topography. These conversations can also lead to topics about science, history, and culture, which are also tied to wine. Taste is the ultimate catalyst because it is so personal and essential to our identity. It can also be intensely pleasurable, especially if the wine is good!
Of course, wine is complex and, for many people, not very approachable. Its long history and reliance on various areas of expertise can make the experience daunting for newbie visitors. The expertise found in winemakers and sommeliers, who are incredible super tasters and highly knowledgeable, can be seen as intimidating to casual or first-time tasters.
Making a tasting more about what the visitor tastes is a step in the right direction. It doesn’t require technology, but our interactive wine-tasting experience, by its very nature, rewrites some of the old rules. We’ve been cheered to see that even folks new to wine-tasting enjoy the experience! It can also change the role of the knowledgeable winemaker or sommelier, who can be the “guide on the side” rather than the “sage on the stage” to use a well-worn metaphor from education. It also frees knowledgeable winemakers and sommeliers from the “mechanics” of tastings, allowing them to be more active in conversation with guests.
By making the wine-tasting experience more accessible and engaging, visitors get more connected to the world of wine and perhaps more loyal to specific makers and brands. Recording and sharing their tastes is an active and generative process, so engagement is about as deep as it comes from a straightforward marketing perspective. More importantly, these experiences open up other topics that can either deepen visitors' knowledge about your brand and its history and processes or introduce new issues beyond what’s in your glass.
Of course, sensory dining experiences don’t need to be about wine; they could be about virtually anything. Taste is the catalyst. History, science, culture, and almost any topic could be woven into a story that starts with taste. For example, in a few of our pop-up tastings, when we were prototyping and testing the Wine Experience software focused on mission grapes (Listán Prieto), which were first brought to New Mexico in 1629, the conversations ranged widely. Participants talked about the Spanish conquest, the history of the grapes (the first European grapes in North America), the history of winemaking in in New Mexico, and even the science behind genetically testing grapes and the cousins of these grapes currently grown on the Canary Islands.
With so many possibilities, we’ve focused on improving the tasting process using our hardware & software and how folks share what they discover. In some ways, the more streamlined and robust the process, the greater the opportunities to create unique installations. Taste is at the heart, but it could be that other topics related to the brand or overarching story are introduced in that setting. The catalyst for these conversations could be additions to the software or the use of other technology in the wine-tasting setting, or it simply could be the introduction of a very knowledgeable winemaker, sommelier, or wine educator.
We are continuing to develop the Tasting Table and Wine (and Sparkling) Experience software, adding new features based on the feedback we’ve received from participants. We are also starting to design a beer-tasting module and we’ve begun discussing exploring gin and other spirits. There is a lot to explore and discover when it comes to taste. There is a story in every bottle and many deep conversations waiting at every table; we just need to unlock them.
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