Imagine a world where deciding what to eat for lunch could be inspired by a simple set of recommendations from your refrigerator. The Smart Fridge, designed by Ashley Legg from ASUSDESIGN, aims to target those who have shunted cooking to a hobby and rely more on designer microwave meals.



In perspective, the idea is to present a refrigerator that is intelligent enough to invent its own kitchen recipes based on whatever it gets stocked with. The prototype design features a capacitive multi-touch panel mounted to the door for entering ingredients as they are placed inside and deleting them when they are used. While this type of data entry design might become tedious for the average soccer mom or football junkie, it does provide a way for the refrigerator to quantify the contents of its inventory and generates some recipes that may not be known to the user.

Of course, the Smart Fridge features a voice guide that provides systematic instructions for preparing meals, spoon by spoon, just like the annoying GPS guides found in many cars on the highway.



While we certainly appreciate the designer’s aspiration to incorporate technology into another critical part of everyday life, there are obvious improvements that can be made through the use of Internet connectivity. For instance, a more futuristic implementation would be the use smart sensors within the refrigerator itself that can detect the contents of its inventory based on augmented vision analysis. The device would then be connected to the world wide web via Ethernet or WiFi, depending on the user’s choice, upon which analyzed data could be sent to a server in the cloud to process the information and deliver it back with user recommended recipes, cooking tips and other socially integrated amenities . Of course, our vision of a cloud refrigerator is nothing more than a wistful conception that we hope could someday make it to the mass consumer market, but we are definitely intrigued by the Smart Fridge’s primitive featureset.



More pictures here.