The XR Table: Envisioning The Future of Remote Dining Experiences Using Immersive Telepresence

Eating is a vital, social, and intimate experience. Eating with others positively influences our health and mood and enhances our social relationships. However, sometimes, we lack the time, or the circumstances do not allow us to have this intimate experience physically. Current technology, such as video calls, somehow helps bridge the gap of physicality. However, they provide only a fraction of the social experience that face-to-face interaction allows. Recent progress in Immersive Telepresence and eXtended Reality (XR) enables an opportunity to redefine digital commensality, not only to overcome the gap of physical distance, but also to go beyond and redefine the experience of eating. In this paper, we--a multidisciplinary team of technology and commensality researchers--envision the future of digital commensality through immersive technology. To this end, we conducted two participatory co-design workshops and used iterative analysis to identify a set of design criteria that were applied to a working prototype system: the XR Table.