A new research center -- dubbed the "restaurant of the future"-- at the Dutch university of Wageningen hopes to help answer these questions and more by tracking diners with dozens of unobtrusive cameras and monitoring their eating habits.
"We want to find out what influences people: colors, taste, personnel. We try to focus on one stimulus, like light,"said Rene Koster, head of the Center for Innovative Consumer Studies, as overhead bulbs switched through green, red, orange and blue.
"This restaurant is a playground of possibilities. We can ask the staff to be less friendly and visible or the reverse,"he said. "The changes must be small. If you were making changes every day it would be too disruptive. People wouldn't like it."
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