Rendezfood successfully finished!
The Rendezfood project, which began in April 2019, has now come to an end after three successful years. On March 30, 2022, the last consortium meeting took place, where our group had a final exchange with the project partners netzfactor GmbH and Vorländer Mediengruppe. After a live interactive demo of the Rendezfood system, which allows users to get to know dishes on a personal level with the help of a mobile application, insights into the field research conducted to evaluate the developed applications were presented.
We continue to see great potential in the combination of location-based applications, chatbots, and augmented reality. The app’s main feature is that one can find dishes independently of the restaurant, based on their “personal” characteristics such as ingredients or preparation, and then learn more about the dishes, e.g., cultivation method or regionality, via an AR application or chat while waiting.
Due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the last consortium meeting also took place online. However, due to the quick switch to digital video conferencing systems, communication between the consortium partners ran smoothly throughout the project, so there were no major limitations during the development phase. However, much of the evaluation had to be redesigned during the final phase of the project due to the emptier city centers caused by the pandemic.
Human-food interaction, which was at the core of Rendezfood, is an emerging but largely unexplored field. We are glad that through the publications within the project, our group was able to make an important contribution to this new research field. The two operational project members Philip Weber and Kevin Krings gained many new skills through Rendezfood – both on a technical level and in the coordination of large teams, which will also benefit them in the following projects RegioQuest and BIMPUT.
It is also certain that Kevin Krings and Philip Weber are aiming for further publications based on their broad experience and research results from the project. Whether the app and the concept can be transferred to other areas remains to be seen. Even though the time of talking apples and cozy burgers has come to an end, for the time being, we look back on three successful years and once again thank all consortium partners, evaluation participants, and contributors for the very productive collaboration.