CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Beneath a glass bowl and a jar of peanuts on the fourth floor of the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology rests the single person's answer to a cooking catastrophe: an intelligent kitchen counter.
How many nuts? Too few means candy with no crunch; too many makes the dessert crumbly.
Forget the recipe; just pour those peanuts into the bowl. Yawn, maybe daydream. The counter top will tell you -- yes, it will speak to you -- to stop when there are enough nuts in the bowl. It'll tell you to pick up the butter next, and let you know when you've added the right amount. A few more steps and presto: perfect peanut brittle, every time.
That's the concept behind a five-year research project at MIT called Counter Intelligence. Started in October, the kitchen of the future is being created here: intelligent coffee machines that know to make a double espresso at 8 a.m.; microwaves that know how long to cook frozen French toast to perfection; refrigerators that know exactly what needs to be reordered on grocery day.
The founding spirit behind this project is Joseph Kaye, a 22-year-old MIT graduate whose goal is to create a completely personalized kitchen. Kaye will begin studying for his master's degree next year by donning an apron and mixing cutting-edge item-identification technology with coffee, cookies, and anything else he can figure out how to make "smart."
Essentially, Kaye wants to turn your entire kitchen into a computer. Appliances could communicate with each other. Lights could flash when the washing machine reaches the spin cycle. The kitchen would track coffee gone from the pantry shelves, ice cream taken from the freezer.
The technology relies on a replacement for bar codes called Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID. It's used in automated toll collecting -- like the new Massachusetts Fast Lane program at the eastern end of the Massachusetts Turnpike. As do bar codes, RFID tags contain specific information: Fast Lane has names and addresses for billing; in grocery shopping, they hold item prices.
Mr. Java, Counter Intelligence's first creation, uses the tag technology. The souped-up Acorto 2000 coffee maker sits in a cramped student and faculty kitchen in the Media Lab.
About 30 people in the building have coffee cups with round RFID tags glued to the bottom. The tags contain a computer chip that holds information about the cup owner's coffee preferences. A sensor underneath the machine's spout reads the tag and pours: latte, a little extra milk, extra large. Your coffee, perfect for you every time.
