The $500 Dinner Plate

A $500 dinner plate is not such a big deal on its own, just Tiffany's offers a plate with hand-painted rims for 3 times the price, but what if that plate changes appearance all the time and can also function like a computer?

Japanese blogger Takahiko Shiina figured that there are plenty of benefits to use an iPad as a serving dish that he dubbed iDish. For one, you can change the appearance of your dish to the millions of image online.

Takahiko started his quest by dropping a piece of sashimi on his iPad and then thought of the possibilities by doing some experiments:



He found out that by putting food in a proper setting, even boxed sushi that's past its prime looks pretty appetizing:





You can make food look authentic, like these frozen shumai:



If you don't have lots of food to start with, you can make it look like you do. That'll work if you're on a diet:



You can even use your iPod as a small plate for condiments or small appetizer:





If an app idea like iDish is to really be prodcued, one should hope to add some sound or animation to the dish. Take this grill for example, it will be a lot better if some sizzling sound is in the background will some grease bubbles around.



Take the hand for example, Takahiko claimed that if you feel lonely you can pretend eating from someone's hand which is a creepy concept to start with but if you're going for that why not add the voice of your mom or some nice female telling you to eat up before it gets cold or something a caring person would say?



Of course, the concept is not without its problems, one thing is that the iPad is a flat surface and saucier food will run all over the pad and make it hard to scoop. Since there's no borders, food like curry rice will run across the border of the "plate" and ruin the illusions.



Some food textures like the one of this flan is very close to the human touch hence confuse the sensors on the iPad.



Takahiko also mentioned that the iPad is hard to clean and the smell of the food will linger on the iPad, it's best to use an LCD protector on top. So the conclusion of the experiment is that it's not recommendable to use the iPad as a plate.

Oh well, like we didn't know that in the first place.