Development and Evaluation of Mixed Reality Co-eating System: Sharing the Behavior of Eating Food with a Robot Could Improve Our Dining Experience

Eating with others enhances our dining experience, improves socialization, and has some health benefits. Although many people do not want to eat alone, there is an increase in the number of people who eat alone in Japan due to difficulty in matching mealtimes and places with others.In this paper, we develop a mixed reality (MR) system for coeating with a robot. In this system, a robot and a MR headset are connected enabling users to observe a robot putting food image into its mouth, as if eating. We conducted an experiment to evaluate the developed system with users that are at least 13 years old. Experimental results show that the users enjoyed their meal and felt more delicious when the robot ate with them than when the robot only talked without eating. Furthermore, they eat more when a robot eats, suggesting that a robot could influence people’s eating behavior.