Marcelo Coelho's Digital Gastronomy Machines

Designer and researcher Marcelo Coelho has created a series of very interesting “digital gastronomy machines” that I would not necessarily call small kitchen appliances. These machines, the Digital Fabricator, the Robotic Chef, and the Viruoso Mixer, make you look at cooking in a whole new way. They digitally create meals, manipulate solid food objects, and create new ingredients.

Digital Fabricator: The Digital Fabricator stores, mixes, cooks, and then deposits thin layers of ingredients. In simplest terms it can be described as a printer for food. The canisters hold and refrigerate the user's favorite ingredients. They are piped into a mixer and then into an extruder head where they can be deposited into different combinations very preciously. While the ingredients are being deposited, the food is cooked by the heating and cooling tubes which are located on the printing head. The touch screen interface allows the user to have control over the origin, quality, nutritional value, and taste of each meal.

Robotic Chef: The Robotic Chef can transform any single solid food object by either localized and precise manipulations or by global transformations. The machine is essentially an mechanical arm made up of a toolhead, two robotic arms, and an underling bed. The toolhead houses drill bits, mineral and spice injection syringes, and lower power laser diode, which can cut, cook, and spice the food object that is held by robotic arms. The underlying bed holds a heating plate, which can heat and cook the food object that is being manipulated by the arm.

Virtuoso Mixer: The Virtuoso Mixer machine is a three-layer rotating carousel that mixes different ingredients in order to experiment and create different food variations. The top layer is made up of 8 containers that house off-the-shelf ingredients. These containers have weight scales, and temperature and humidity sensors in order for the user to monitor the properties of these ingredients. The middle layer is 8 containers that have crushing and mixing devices in them. The bottom layer functions as a tray where the final ingredient mixtures are deposited. These bottom containers have an array of thermoelectric heating and cooling devices and an insulating glass cover. The chef can design and create different ingredients through the use of the digital interface. The user can taste the ingredients during experimentation and can save the final digital recipes on the machine.

(See original core77 post here)

The Digital Fabricator, being somewhat of a food printer, reminds me of the "organ printing" idea in medicine. As of now researchers can print out living human tissue and they believe that with further development they could print out full living human organs. This "organ printing" could drastically change the world of medicine by making organ donating obsolete.