Whirlpool has recently announced a new smart oven concept that uses AR to help users in their cooking. The new smart oven is called the Whirlpool Connected Hub Wall Oven, the AR support makes it more unique among the other smart oven category.
The oven has a 27-inch transparent LCD display on its front door, which you can use to pull up recipes. Once you select a recipe, the screen will tell you to gather the necessary ingredients and then display where to place food on the racks. In the demo I got to see, the oven suggested placing salmon on a top rack and asparagus on the bottom so that both items would be well-cooked at the same time.
AR comes into play in a couple of ways here, although it doesn’t look as impressive as it sounds. You’re able to see how the meal should look when it’s finished cooking; so in my example, a floating salmon dish would hover on the front door before disappearing. And you can also see visualizations of where to place the trays. As someone who had to learn through trial and error to put the spinach puffs up top and the pizza on the lower rack, I would definitely find this feature useful.
While everything’s cooking, an internal camera allows you to check up on your food and even zoom in for a better look. It’s a convenient way to see if your crust is golden brown but not yet burnt without opening your oven door, which might affect the bake.
For now it is just a concept and there is no release date for the oven. The company has said it will take a lot of further iterations and feedback from users before it reaches a final version.
