"Big Brother" restaurant opens to study diners

By Emma Thomasson

WAGENINGEN, Netherlands (Reuters) - Does service with a scowl put you off at lunch? Will you eat more greens if you are surrounded by plants? Does romantic, pink lighting encourage you to linger over your fruit salad?

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."

The stylish new facility has glass walls, black marble countertops, a polished bamboo floor and self-service tills which allow diners to scan their lunch while they and their trays are weighed by a set of scales built into the floor.

University staff who want to eat at the new restaurant have to sign a consent form agreeing to be watched.

From a control room, researchers can direct cameras built into the ceiling of the restaurant to zoom in on individual diners and their plates. They watch how people walk through the restaurant, what food catches their eye, whether they always sit at the same table and how much food they throw away.

"You're already watched by cameras everywhere like 'Big Brother' so what difference does it make here?" said Bert Visser, a plant scientist eating a chicken sandwich. "Presentation really influences what you choose."