Pineapple has created a revolutionary AR app for food visualization

Last weekend HackZurich, Europe’s largest hackathon (programming competition), took place for the fourth time in Zurich, Switzerland. It was a very successful event with 550 participants from more than 50 countries that have submitted more than 140 projects. Pineapple was one of the contesting teams. It consists of Nikolay Kobyshev (who was also a co-founder and organizer of HackZurich 4 years ago) and Sergi Caelles Prat, both Computer Vision PhD students from ETH Zurich.

Pineapple has created an app for using the latest virtual reality technology for visualizing food you are about to order in a restaurant. To use the app, the user just has to point the phone at their yet empty plate and they will see photorealistic models of food from the menu.

One can see how the product works in the demo video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugE5GQb0FXQ

Both founders are passionate travellers, and they were always having difficulty of not knowing how the food they order will look like, especially in restaurants abroad. An obvious solution to this problem would be adding pictures of food to the menu, but restaurants usually hesitate doing so as they do not want to sacrifice the elegancy of their menus. Sergi and Nikolay offer a hi-tech solution to this problem. “Augmented Reality will revolutionize the way people consume in the next couple of years. The usual cases for AR are buying furniture and fashion products, but food is maybe even more important as we rely a lot on what we see when deciding if a product is tasty or not,” Nikolay says. “It will also help customers to see in advance the quantity of food in a dish reducing in this way the leftovers,” adds Sergi.

The app uses the freshly released Apple ARKit as a basis for the technology, but it also has a special computer vision algorithm that Sergi and Nikolay have developed.

Now the founders want to contact leading restaurant chains and food delivery services to discuss potential collaboration.

From my point of view, it would be a nice added value to the menu in the restaurants. So you can see what you order and you don't have nasty surprises!