Sonic Straws is a set of interactive cups that play different sounds when drinking any beverage through its two straws, adding a multisensory layer to the experience of sharing a beverage. Sonic Straws demonstrates that adding interactive sound can enhance the social experience of sharing a beverage, with users in an in-the-wild study reporting that the system supported self-expression via playful drinking actions, facilitated pleasurable social drinking moments, and promoted reflection on drinking practices.  

This work highlights that “gustosonic” experiences, where sound enriches the drinking experience, can be an exciting way to combine technology and food. The resulting research suggests that such a gustosonic approach could amplify entertainment experiences around drinking and possibly even eating. Furthermore, it could highlight the joy coming from sharing a beverage, while also providing inspiration on how to facilitate mindful engagement with what one drinks. Ultimately, my aim is to contribute to the enrichment of drinking and dining experiences through playful design.

Publications:

Yan Wang, Zhuying Li, Rohit Ashok Khot, and Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller. 2022. Toward Understanding Playful Beverage-based Gustosonic Experiences. Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol. 6, 1, Article 33 (March 2022), 23 pages. ( PDF | ACM LINK )

Yan Wang, Zhuying Li, Rohit Ashok Khot, and Florian Floyd Mueller. 2021. Sonic Straws: A beverage-based playful gustosonic system. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2021 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2021 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (UbiComp ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 81–82. ( PDF | ACM LINK )