Being There: Developing VR for Culinary Arts

(Time to Read: 5 mins.)

In August of 2024, mem­bers of CTLR were invit­ed to test new VR train­ing sys­tems beng devel­oped by VCC’s Culi­nary Arts pro­gram.

The team I’m in, CTLR, is a small depart­ment, serv­ing all schools and cen­tres in VCC with a diverse col­lec­tion of aca­d­e­m­ic and tech­ni­cal skills and expe­ri­ence.

CTLR con­tains two func­tion­al teams: Instruc­tion­al Asso­ciates, who are for­mer depart­ment lead­ers, instruc­tors, and aca­d­e­mics pro­vid­ing ped­a­gog­i­cal and project man­age­ment sup­port to VCC’s fac­ul­ty. The oth­er team is eLearn­ing Sup­port, who com­bine tech­ni­cal skills in sys­tem admin­is­tra­tion, pro­gram­ming, and web design with cre­ative skills in graph­ics, sound, eLearn­ing, and dig­i­tal media.

Usu­al­ly, mem­bers of eLearn­ing Sup­port (aka “eLSup­port”) con­sult on the tech­ni­cal and imple­men­ta­tion aspects of a learn­ing design. We might look at a design through the lens of our col­lege’s var­i­ous tech­nol­o­gy plat­forms, con­sid­er­ing inter­op­er­abil­i­ty, data com­mu­ni­ca­tions, or prac­ti­cal­i­ty in terms of user sup­port — the “how” aspects. The Instruc­tion­al Asso­ciates (“IAs”) are usu­al­ly asked to pro­vide exper­tise on the strat­e­gy and qual­i­ty of the instruc­tion­al design and its learn­ing out­comes — the “why” aspects.

My first hands-on demonstration

I was asked to help test the Culi­nary Arts depart­men­t’s ear­ly pro­to­type vir­tu­al real­i­ty lessons for bak­ing and cook­ing process­es. One of Culi­nary’s large steel teach­ing kitchens pro­vid­ed the test­ing envi­ron­ment, and a lap­top and Meta VR head­set and hand con­trollers were set up for me to use. Putting on the head­set and hold­ing a con­troller in each hand, I was guid­ed through some ini­tial set­up and ori­en­ta­tion steps by my host and guide, Chef Michael Knie.

That first explo­ration was very fun, but also a bit of a chal­lenge for me. Aside from the fact that I can bare­ly cook more than to fry an egg, I’d nev­er used a Meta Ocu­lus VR set before. It had actu­al­ly been at least a cou­ple of years since I’d played with any kind of VR sys­tem; VCC’s CAD-BIM depart­ment had demon­strat­ed theirs for 3D VR walk-throughs of archi­tec­tur­al mod­els. Dur­ing that brief tour of the CAD-BIM depart­men­t’s archi­tec­tur­al appli­ca­tion, the basic chal­lenge in front of me had been “walk through this build­ing” (or fly through the build­ing, which was even cool­er). But for the Culi­nary Arts pro­gram, the chal­lenge was much more com­pli­cat­ed: I had to actu­al­ly mix a dough and pipe out a choux pas­try onto a bak­ing sheet. I did not know what choux pas­try was, but I doubt­ed that I could make it with my own hands, much less with a pair of dig­i­tal ones oper­at­ed using hand-held game con­trollers.

The soft­ware had a kind of vir­tu­al host or guide; a sys­tem nar­ra­tor with a calm, neu­tral voice talked in my ear to guide me through the recipe step-by-step, telling me when I’d done some­thing cor­rect­ly or if I made an error. I’ll call the nar­ra­tor “Juli­et”. She sound­ed like she was from a Lon­don tele­phone com­pa­ny; pleas­ant and ever so slight­ly detached.

I’m not a gamer, much less a pas­try chef, so as I lurched and flailed around in the emp­ty air over an emp­ty stain­less steel coun­ter­top, my VR hand strug­gled to grip a ladle or to pour vir­tu­al milk into its vir­tu­al bowl. I basi­cal­ly demon­strat­ed all the culi­nary finesse of a draft horse on roller-skates, blun­der­ing my way through all the essen­tial moves. Suf­fice to say, I heard from my Eng­lish VR nar­ra­tor Juli­et a lot.

Have a look

The com­pa­ny that did the sys­tem devel­op­ment for Culi­nary Arts also cre­at­ed a demo video of the VCC solu­tion in action. You can see the video below and read more about the soft­ware they designed, on their web­site: https://sbanimation.com/case-studies/vr-training-for-cooks/

Where’s the sweet spot?

After I did that first VR demo, I did have some mixed feel­ings…

There’s def­i­nite­ly a gam­ing cul­ture baked into the VR skills train­ing propo­si­tion: you must have some facil­i­ty with the hand­held game con­trollers, and not be sub­ject to dizzi­ness or dis­ori­en­ta­tion when what your eyes are being pre­sent­ed with does­n’t match what your fin­ger­tips are sig­nal­ing back to your brain. It takes some prac­tice, but in the end, it became real­ly quite a fun appli­ca­tion to learn with.

From an expense and access per­spec­tive, the plus­es of a VR tool seem very straight­for­ward: No trav­el, no dan­ger­ous hot stove­top, no sharp knives, and no wast­ed ingre­di­ents. Since you’re just push­ing pix­els around on a head-mount­ed dis­play, you can prac­tice the sequence of steps for as long or as often as you need to.

At some lev­el, a kind of mus­cle mem­o­ry must become asso­ci­at­ed with the men­tal mod­el of the recipe steps. Play­ing a vir­tu­al cook in VR must have some kind of expe­ri­en­tial over­lap with real process­es in a real kitchen, but how close does that over­lap get? How much can a vir­tu­al prac­tice les­son envi­ron­ment like this pre­pare some­one to work in a real kitchen with real food, real col­leagues, and real results? I feel like the data on that ques­tion is “out there” some­where. For now, it may reduce down to some­thing resem­bling “close enough”, since there are already scores of appli­ca­tions using VR to train peo­ple for real-world sit­u­a­tions in all kinds of dis­ci­plines.

Per­son­al­ly, I’m not sold on VR as a medi­um for learn­ing in every appli­ca­tion or sce­nario, but there must be an effi­ca­cy “sweet spot” that can be reached, some­where between ini­tial user ori­en­ta­tion and train­ing, and an effec­tive, prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion that helps a stu­dent achieve a real-world learn­ing out­come. For this kind of VR tech and immer­sive expe­ri­ence, more test­ing and exper­i­men­ta­tion will help to reveal that sweet spot. It was excit­ing to spec­u­late how real users with real goals would undoubt­ed­ly light a fire under their vir­tu­al cook­ing lessons.

I must add that I loved the low-cost, con­sumer-grade VR tech being used in this project. I think it effec­tive­ly moves the per­cep­tion of acces­si­bil­i­ty and usage bar­ri­ers down to the liv­ing-room lev­el for an aver­age house­hold, and meets users where they are in terms of a friend­ly, “gam­ing” approach to prac­tic­ing new skills. All of that can help to dis­pel the notion that this VR sim­u­la­tion is an exclu­sive or high­ly tech­ni­cal tool. The Culi­nary Arts VR cook­ing and bak­ing appli­ca­tions are actu­al­ly referred to as “games”, which makes the whole train­ing propo­si­tion feel very approach­able.

The Bottom Line

Regard­less of any hes­i­ta­tions I may have had, my first expe­ri­ence with their soft­ware sim­u­la­tions end­ed up being fun and suc­cess­ful: I got my choux pas­try dough piped out on my bak­ing sheet, and popped it all into the vir­tu­al oven.

In the real world, the Culi­nary Arts team did get usabil­i­ty feed­back from oth­er VCC staff, and then forged ahead with a pilot VR cook­ing course using real VCC stu­dents. We’ll look at those results in more detail in the next post on this top­ic…