Use your noodle

The northern Italian city of Bologna is so famous for its rich food that it has a nickname: "Bologna la grassa," or "Bologna the fat." Even the city's software developers have turned to pasta for inspiration.

After demonstrating it at last year's World Expo in Shanghai, Bologna University computers scientists showed Italians the new game Tortellino X-perience for the first time last week.

Said to have been inspired by Venus' navel, tortellini are a type of small, stuffed pasta packages that require time, dexterity and years of practice to make well by hand. The game, however, challenges players to make their own virtual tortellini using motion-sensing software and a webcam.

The game made its Italian premier at Cantina Bentivoglio, a Bologna restaurant specializing in tortellini, and diners were treated to a taste of both the real and the virtual versions.

"The challenge was connecting tradition with innovation and specifically the idea was that of combining a traditional dish of our hometown with new technologies," said Marco Roccetti, a professor of computer science at the University of Bologna.

He was tasked with developing a piece of software that could highlight the city at last year's World Expo.

"We chose tortellini for two reasons: the first one was that we wanted to try a new means to preserve the culinary cultural heritage of our hometown, and the second reason was that making tortellini is a hard task," he explained to Deutsche Welle. "And so also designing and architecting a game which involved the making of tortellini was a hard task from a technical viewpoint."

Inspiration from Japan

The Italian developer said he was inspired by a Sony video that taught Buddhist monks how to perform a tea ceremony.

"There was a wall on which the correct action and also the duration of the action was displayed and also the duration of the silences that monks should perform to carry out the tea ceremony," Roccetti said.

Tortellino X-perience, however, is a multimedia didactic game that combines a traditional video with a 3D representation of the player's hands.

The video features a sfoglina, a professional Bolognese pasta maker. Step by step, she teaches the player the stages of tortellini making: from combing ingredients, kneading and rolling out the dough to cutting, stuffing, sealing and twisting the tiny meat-filled packages closed.

The player can't move on to the next stage until after having successfully imitated - virtually of course - the sfoglina's movements. The game defines "winning" as having successfully completed all the stages.

Using a webcam, the player's movements are tracked by gesture recognition software, and they can simultaneously see them reproduced on the screen through stop-motion video.

Game is not commercially available

Since Tortellino X-perience runs on a PC with an attached webcam, it does not require a hand-held controller like Nintendo's Wii or an expensive 3D camera like Microsoft's Kinect, Roccetti said.

"The emphasis of this project is that all the intelligence of the system is on the software side, not on the hardware side," he said, adding that not having to use a game console was the program's most important innovation.

Although the game isn't commercially for sale, Roccetti said he hopes its concept will be applied in museums, schools or exhibitions, allowing people to play video games or interact with computers by using a new kind of intuitive, non-invasive interface.

Diners at the Bologna restaurant seemed generally happy with both their virtual tortellini, and of course, the real dish as well.

"It makes you understand very well how tortellini are made, even if the reality is very difficult - maybe eating tortellini is easier than making tortellini," said one diner.

Author: Dany Mitzman, Bologna / cjf

Editor: Sean Sinico