Mixit: Boba Tea Making in Mixed Reality

Inspiration

Our project was inspired by the unlocked potential of head-mounted devices and mixed reality (MR), and at the same time the power of everyday life interactions. The idea was to explore how MR integration could make common tasks more engaging and efficient.

What it does

Mixit is all about augmenting the art of making Boba Tea by using the power of Mixed Reality. This way, not only discovering new recipes is possible, but most importantly, using the spatial capabilities to improve the learning process in an engaging way.

In very simple steps, the user can choose between different recipes, know what are the ingredients needed and in which proportion. The user can then create a digital twin of a physical cup to prepare the Boba Tea with spatial visual cues that indicate the exact volume of the components to be added, in real time. When it is time to enjoy the drink, each recipe brings a different embodied audiovisual experience to enhance the taste and smell of the desired recipe.

How we built it

The project underwent three distinct stages:

1. Idea Formation: We started with conceptualization and planning. This involved crossing the team member’s interests, and extracting the essence of our ideas that were built progressively on top of each other.

2. Dedicated Development: By the second day, we dived into full-scale development with clear role divisions—some focused on design aesthetics, while others worked on functionality. We used a task tracker for efficient execution, while keeping an agile method oriented to quickly iterating based on colleagues and mentor feedbacks.

3. Overcoming Challenges: We faced hurdles, such as losing a 3D modeler mid-project. This required us to swiftly adjust our development strategy, redistribute tasks, and maintain our momentum.

Each stage taught us valuable lessons in adaptability, collaboration, and the power of MR technology to transform simple activities into extraordinary experiences.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Besides the usual time constraints, we were able to deliver an end-to-end micro experience with a visual language that synthesize the idea while at the same time dedicating efforts into very specific valuable features such as the physical-digital cup for measurement.

What we learned

Ideation Phase: Initially, we aimed to design a system that would assist in cooking, finding recipes, guiding ingredient preparation, and multitask streamlining. After thoughtful consideration, we decided to focus on a more practical and interactive scenario for a hackathon timeframe. We chose to create a boba tea making experience in MR, blending the versatility of the virtual objects with the richness of the multi sensorial world: beyond seeing and hearing there is a lot to be experienced on taste, smell and touch.

Learning and Building: Our team rapidly developed prototyping skills, learning to establish workflow sequences and pipelines swiftly. We honed our abilities in teamwork and mutual support. Technically, we created interaction models such as a physical-digital cup that follows user movement. Design and aesthetics were also carefully integrated into our solution.

What's next?

We believe the current prototype for Mixit can be easily expanded into a platform for drinks creation and sharing, for both alcoholic and non alcoholic beverages. This territory holds not only valuable brands but also a lot of technique, art, expression and sensorial richness.

While virtual reality is a territory for gaming (where simulating taste and smell is unreachable), mixed reality can really push beyond and integrate all the previously mentioned factors together with a bits of fun and gamification. Also, drink making is a very manual bodily process, which benefits from the ever improving hand tracking capabilities.

... what if you could learn to make any drink? Mixit!