The problem I am going to try to solve in this post is the problem of vegetarians, vegans, and other forms of specific diets cannot immediately tell if there are meat (or other) products in a food item. Countless hours are spent researching which food items are okay to eat, which are surprisingly not (for example, marshmallows and Jello are not vegetarian/vegan, because they have gelatin in them, which is made with hooves). Sometimes a food product doesn't explicitly say in the ingredients that it is made with meat products or meaty broth, and as a vegetarian I am constantly scrutinizing over whether or not I'm eating something that vegetarian or not (and it's even worse for vegans).
Ideally, I would want to make an app that takes advantage of augmented reality technology. You would be able to hold up your phone to a food product in the grocery store, and the app would have "filters", meaning depending on the filter you use, it could tell you if a food item is vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, nut-free, kosher, lactose free, or not. People with nut allergies could use the nut-free filter, people who have celiac could use the gluten-free filter. I'm not 100% sure if this is possible with current technology, but that's my idea, since existing food apps usually just have you type in a specific product and scroll through all the variations and brands of that product that come up in the results. Those apps don't really save any time, because I still waste a lot of time scrolling through the results to find what I actually need, and even then those apps are for calorie tracking and seeing the composition of ingredients, rather than seeing if the product meets the standards of a particular diet. Using QR codes rather than augmented reality for each filter would make more sense logistically, but isn't as cool. If AR isn't realistic for right now, I stand by my idea but with QR codes on food products that can be scanned. This would require cooperation with big food companies, which would be really hard to work out, but ultimately it would be to their benefit as well because it would help them sell more products if they could advertise them as app-friendly.
Hi Kyleigh,
ReplyDeleteYour idea is very interesting. I think it would give people greater access to food information. I believe people should be increasingly aware of the things that they eat. However, I still can’t really picture how the AR would look like when looking at products. Would the filter highlight products that match your query, such as darkening products you don’t want and highlighting products that match your criteria? I also believe that the QR code would be faster to do. I think the greatest challenge for this is to first establish the information channels with companies using QR codes, and then evolve to augmented reality afterward.