For coffee lovers, nothing compares to their favorite brand from the cozy local café. What can get better than that? What about your coffee embellished with foam art? Interesting, huh?
It's not easy to create foam designs. That is a craft that demands creativity, precision, and care on the part of the barista. But what if it could be all done by a machine instead? What if you could create any beautiful and customized design on your coffee foam with a machine? Print your own company logo in your coffee? Tell your girlfriend how much you love her? So many cool ideas for coffee foam art!
Meet the Ripple Maker, the machine that can print any detailed designs onto your coffee foam. This is actually not a new idea. A café in Taiwan allows customers to print their selfies directly onto their coffee foam. The Textspresso lets you print any texts onto the same unusual medium. And a Japanese designer has also created a gadget that works as a sort of 3D printer onto coffee foam.
All these options are impressive, but it seemed that they're still missing something. They do not let users to create custom designs and print them directly onto the foam.
The Ripple Maker finally offers this option, too. This smart gadget comes in to produce high-resolution designs that can be printed or "rippled" onto cappuccinos, lattes, or any other type of foam topped drink. This way a coffee shop or any venue can promote events via rippled messages onto its coffees.
For this purpose, the creators of the Ripple Maker used a unique combination of hardware and software. Steam CC, the company behind the device, has already made a deal with the German Airline Lufthansa for producing Ripple Maker machines for the passengers at First and Business Class. And, most likely several high-end coffee shops will not delay to pick up a device of their own for better coffee experience.
The Ripple Maker works by combining an ink jet printer with the 3D and using a natural coffee extract in order to form the ripples that primarily create the designs. With a Ripple Maker, you can print any image in less than 10 seconds.
What's more, the Ripple Maker is actually a connected device and you can share your designs with other users or submit them to be included to the platform library. For a niche marketing tool, the device is still pretty expensive. However, since it caters to restaurants and coffee shops, the price might be affordable for them. The first Ripple Maker machines will start shipping this September 2015.
