[singlepic id=104 w=320 h=240 float=left]Thursday 24th, I left home really, really early. I arrived at Eindhoven station at 7:15 am, in order to be in time for the train towards Utrecht. There are only a number of things that I deem worthy of my morning, and I never guessed going to a seminar would be one of them.

Bart invited me to go to Wageningen with him, to visit the restaurant of the future. It was supposed to be a state of the art laboratory, and a cooperation between Wageningen University and Noldus, a company that designs solutions for behavioral research. I’ve had a one day training with Noldus software at the beginning of this year, so I kinda knew what they did. And I expected seeing a behavioral research laboratory in a restaurant setting to be worth my time.
Anyways, really early in the morning, going to a seminar is not something I do often, so I did not have the best preparation. After 2 hours by train and bus, I realized that going to something like this in Dickies and an Adidas jacket might not be the best way to present yourself. But feck it right? We arrived at Noldus, drank a cup of coffee and chatted with some people, which was already quite nice. But of course they had a program for us.

The day started with some presentations on Noldus. Later on people presented some use cases, which to me all seemed kinda… dodgy. In my master’s I’m being taught how to properly design an experiment. We do a literature study, in which we try to find out what factors might be of influence on what we’re trying to research, after which we design an experiment in which we try to manipulate as few things as possible and use statistics in order to say if there really is an effect. Completely unlike how the use cases were, where people just gather as much data as possible and use data mining to find possible correlations… One might call it arrogance, but at HTI we really learn how to do proper research.

One thing that was (and still is) bothering me, is the fact that one study was performed by another department of my own university. They have created a laboratory where they do exactly the same research as… our own department. Similar methods, similar research, different labs. Waste of money? Methinks so…

[singlepic id=99 w=320 h=240 float=right]But ok, after the use cases, we were driven to the Restaurant of the Future, where we had a really great lunch (or brunch actually). We had a chat with some employees of Noldus and of course tried to find all cameras used in the observations. Apparently all the cameras and other sensors produce around 60 gigs of data per hour, which has to be processed by (presumably) students afterwards. Via the control room, a number of things can be manipulated. These include smell, temperature, lights, colour, the food, general layout, and more. Things that they want to research with this data are for example the effect that the colour of the lights has on preferences for food. The restaurant is supposed to be running for 10 years, in order to have produced enough data… which is quite long…

[singlepic id=101 w=320 h=240 float=right]After this small demo of the restaurant of the future, we headed back to Noldus where we had some demonstrations of some of the new machinery Noldus has. Among others, these are eyetrackers and once again I got the impression people use these to just have some more data. Researchers just don’t know what they’re looking for anymore, which is a shame…

The whole Noldus thing coming to an end, I walked to the place of a friend of mine, with whom I had dinner. The journey back to Eindhoven was horrible, with missing trains and all. Which lead me to come back home at around midnight, 17 hours after leaving home. Talk about a long day…