Trying to get young kids to eat is like trying to put makeup on a cat – if it doesn’t want it, it’s not happening. The Argentinean arm of mega-creative group Wunderman has come up with a way to make mealtimes for fun for little kids in the hopes that it will encourage better nutrition and a healthy relationship with food.

Yumit is a high-tech interactive meal set that tracks every last bite your kid eats (or doesn’t eat). The main piece of the set is a placemat that doubles as a digital scale. When you put a meal in front of your child, the scale registers the exact weight and uses that as a starting point to gauge how much Junior eats.

Every bite he takes translates into a sort of currency or energy to use in games across a variety of platforms. The more your mini-you eats, the more energy he saves up for his next session of screen time. The idea is that the promise of future fun will help kids focus on eating when it’s time to eat, instead of taking an hour and a half to eat three grapes and a square of cheese (we’ve been there).

The hardware itself is colorful and kid-friendly. The placemat/scale is covered in a washable, heat-resistant silicone. A small strip of multicolored LEDs under the surface keep kids visually engaged during mealtime. The melamine plate and silicone-coated silverware are resistant to all kinds of havoc little hands can wreak on kitchen stuff. The video games that go along with the system haven’t been developed yet, but eventually Yumit will be open to developers.

As parents, we have a few concerns about the idea of encouraging eating with the promise of video games. When we were little, our incentive to eat was the threat going hungry the rest of the day or – even worse – getting a punishment from mom. Will incentivizing and rewarding simple, completely necessary actions lead to a generation of kids who feel entitled to reward for everything they do? Maybe, but when you’re completely desperate to get your toddler to eat something – ANYTHING – even that risk seems low in relation to the possible benefits.

The post Play With Your Food: Gamified Meal Set Makes Eating Fun first appeared on Gajitz.

Replicating 3D-recorded movements of professional chefs, this culinary machine is designed to stir, pour, adjusts temperatures and adds ingredients so as to be indistinguishable from having a world-renowned cook right in your kitchen.

The trick is not, however, in the capturing, but in the complex robotics that go into making something that can simulate the movements of hands, in this case using 20 motors, 24 joints and 129 sensors that can properly mimic human motions.

Mark Oleynik, founder of Moley Robotics, expects their machine to hit mass-market production in 2017, serving demand initially in commercial and then home kitchens, with eventual applications that could go well beyond just cooking.

Users will be able to use their computer or mobile device to pick any one of thousands of dishes and instruct their robots to make them remotely so their meal is ready and waiting when they get home. While this is far from the first attempt to turn robotics to cooking, it is probably the most complex such endeavor to date – other cooking bots can boil, stir and do other basic tasks, but not fully replicate the processes of a professional.

The post Culinary Copycat: Robotic Chef Hands Can Cook 2,000 Meals first appeared on Gajitz.