UMAI: a digital menu via augmented reality technology on mobile apps

A menu is one of a food and beverage company's most significant communication, marketing, and selling tools. An effective menu design should communicate the brand, the vision, the ambience, the food offerings, and the overall experience a guest can expect to enjoy. The problem that always occurs at the restaurant is customers took a long time to order and get confused about what to order due to a lack of information available on the menu. Food information on the printed menu is limited due to insufficient space. This will lead to unclear details about the food that they might order. The traditional printed menu is lack multimedia elements thus making it less interesting. Sometimes the utilization of font, font colour, and image on the menu is not sufficient. An effective menu should be introduced to help attract more customers. This can be delivered by applying the Augmented Reality (AR) menu to enhance the user’s experience in choosing better food. Thus, this study aims to develop an AR menu to increase users’ ordering experience. AR technology closely mimics the real food that will be served, and the quality of the visual displays and colours used in AR can have an impact on one's immersion in the dining experience. 20 participants were recruited to test and evaluate the application and System Usability Score (SUS) is used to evaluate this application. The results of the evaluation represent that this application shows a promising result to increase users’ ordering and dining experience.