When AR meets food: A structural overview of the research space on multi-facets of food

Food has always been interwoven with the human life, biologically and emotionally. Recently, there has been growing research interest in the various aspects of food itself and the food-related activities, in both physical and digital format. Yet, the progress made and the key research questions for these researches are rarely analyzed systematically. In this paper, we summarized the characteristics of food from different perspectives and provided a survey of existing works. We categorized the functions of food into biological, psychological and cultural, and described how augmented and mixed reality technologies have been applied to various aspects of food. We then discussed about the structural research space based on the literatures to address the opportunities and challenges for further development around augmented food experience. The main purpose is to highlight the expressiveness of technology-enhanced food and engage people´s emotional perception and experience with food.