Dunno, personally I kind of look forward to the presentation of the food when I order at a restaurant, I never know exactly how it will look and that's part of the fun. Seeing it in AR model right beforehand seems like it would just lower the experience.
As a practical matter, it makes no sense to waste time and money developing virtual foods when a simple video clip would suffice. There's no advantage for the customer and it would slow the ordering process.
It's a solution looking for a problem, even though its eye-popping as a demo.
How does one customize what is viewed in a video? Recording *every* possible combination that a customer might choose? Not only would that be expensive time wise, but what if you added *one* new ingredient option? Then you'd need to record several more videos including that ingredient. It would be exponentially insane!
AR solves that.
Customize a sandwich in AR? That would be idiotic. The point of looking at a menu is to order the food. Screwing around with a virtual plate of food would be an insane impediment to doing that.
Profitability is the difference between a restaurant that succeeds and one that fails.
I duno, in one of the most popular (busiest / hardest to ever get a seat in without booking well in advance) sandwich places locally to me - their whole menu is just a list of ingredients and you pick whatever you want and choose what you want it in (baguette, panini, toastie, baked potatoe etc. etc.). I obviously don't know their financials but they started from just 2 women running it all to having a team of about 20 employees and have started doing local deliveries too.
Larger food "chains" don't have that ability to customise your meal that some people like or even need (e.g. for allergies).
This really is tech for the sake of tech. If you are standing outside a restaurant you may want to see some of the dishes I suppose, but in my entire life neither I, nor anyone I've eaten with in a restaurant has ever complained about there being a lack of photographs of the dishes on a menu.
Just because it can be done doesn't mean it should be.
That's not to say that I can't imagine plenty of scenarios where AR on a device could be incredibly useful ... but I don't want to be in a restaurant full of people holding iPads in front of them trying to decide whether they should order this or that depending on what it looks like in 3D. It's bad enough already with people on their phones at the dinner table ...
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Larger food "chains" don't have that ability to customise your meal that some people like or even need (e.g. for allergies).
Just because it can be done doesn't mean it should be.
That's not to say that I can't imagine plenty of scenarios where AR on a device could be incredibly useful ... but I don't want to be in a restaurant full of people holding iPads in front of them trying to decide whether they should order this or that depending on what it looks like in 3D. It's bad enough already with people on their phones at the dinner table ...