Let's have dinner together: evaluate the mediated co-dining experience

Having dinner together is undoubtedly a kind of pleasurable experience, which involves various channels for mutual interactions, not only audio, vision and touch, but also smell and taste. With the aim to extend this rich experience to remote situations, we developed the Co-dining system to support a range of mealtime interactions to enhance the feeling of social togetherness. This paper describes the preliminary study with this interactive multisensory system. It aims to investigate the actual effectiveness of the working prototype on enhancing the social presence and engagement during telepresent dining, and also to get a comprehensive understanding about users' perception. This evaluation focused on three main aspects: the overall Co-dining feeling, cultural awareness, and engagement. The study results revealed that this system positively achieved the sense of "being together" among users, through the interactive activities touching upon tableware, tablecloth and real edible food, and each interaction module contributed differently to the overall experience. In this paper, we report the evaluation process, present and interpret the data, and discuss the initial insights to enhance the sense of co-presence through multi-channel interactions.