Digital Sushi, Repurposed Tobacco and More at Dentsu's Upcoming SXSW Exhibition

OPEN MEALS is a project aimed to revolutionize food by converting all kinds of food into digital data. At present, the team is engaged in a project to open SUSHI SINGULARITY TOKYO, a super-futuristic digitized food restaurant experience in Tokyo, and will demonstrate this concept at SXSW 2019. In the near future, OPEN MEALS predicts that two revolutions will occur as sushi digitizes and becomes linked to the Internet: 

1) Sushi will connect with people around the world, who will create, edit and share online, creating new sushi configurations one after another. 

2) Sushi will connect with the human body; personal optimization of nutrients will be achieved based on health data such as vital statistics and genetic composition.

At SXSW, we will reveal for the first time in the world, the prototype of a food manufacturing machine centered on 3D printers and the concept design of sushi, which will be made possible by technology. In the future, we will build a “digital platform where we can store a myriad of food data” so people throughout the world can share and download food. This is the team’s newest project followed by last year’s SUSHI TELEPORTATION.

Did you know repurposing tobacco has the potential to address food insecurity? “Grafting” is a traditional method to improve the taste and the resilience of a plant by cutting a branch and connecting it to another plant of the same family. Our team discovered a process using tobacco as an intermediary that enables us to graft all plant types together, which was thought to be impossible up to now. By delivering cutting-edge biotechnology tools such as genome editing, we are developing disease resistant varieties and crops grown even in non-arable climates, “RETHINKING TOBACCO” is a project for bringing about future changes in food. The exhibition will be held in collaboration with “Todai to Texas” (TTT), an official program of The University of Tokyo, organized by Division of University Corporate Relations (DUCR).

The amount of time infants in Japan spend sleeping is shorter compared to the rest of the world. Much of the parental stress and difficulties surrounding child rearing are related to feeding and sleeping, and generally the rate of participation by fathers tends to be low. Breastfeeding is also effective at helping the parent sleep—a benefit that is currently skewed toward women. Focusing on breastfeeding, we aim to decrease the amount of burden on mothers and increase the amount of time infants sleep by enabling fathers to breastfeed. This is realized with the FATHER’S NURSING ASSISTANT wearable device. Based on advice from pediatricians and babysitters, who say that babies tend to touch the breast with their hands when feeding and that the softness seems to sooth them, the product has been shaped to resemble a woman’s breasts. As a result, a father can hold his baby in both of his arms, creating a deeper skin ship between them and enabling the baby to sleep peacefully in his father’s arms. Father’s Nursing Assistant has a tank for milk on one side and the breastfeeding system on the other. The device also senses the infant’s breastfeeding and sleep timing and is linked to an app that facilitates a better, visual understanding of the infant’s condition.

In Japan, HANKO (stamps) are one of the traditional information tools used since ancient times for public documents and personal verification. By combining HANKO with AR markers, we created HANKOHAN, which not only facilitates personal verification, but also includes other personal information (facial images, self-introductions, etc.). The design on the face of the stamp is created with proprietary algorithms that convert the shapes of the face and eyebrows, the angle of the eyes, the shape of the nose and other features into data that pops up as a facial image when the HANKO is stamped in AR space. It is difficult to remember faces just by exchanging business cards. For these situations, stamping the HANKOHAN on a business card can be expected to spread as a business tool.