Okawari

Welcome to Okawari restaurant, where four guests take a seat at a physical table in an izakaya, the Japanese equivalent of a pub, for a virtual dinner. Choose what you like from the menu and your dishes appear on the conveyor belt. But even before you can start enjoying your meal, you’re being directed to make your next order: garish commercials promote the most expensive dishes, and a scoreboard announces which customer has consumed the most food—and is therefore the winner. This is a consumption competition in three rounds.

Okawari is Japanese for “one more portion,” and that’s precisely what the Okawari VR experience provides: more sushi and gyoza, another bowl of ramen, another plate of karaage chicken and another bottle of sake. But is this seemingly inexhaustible supply of culinary delights as limitless as it seems? And how sustainable is the invisible production process? Okawari was produced to be as green as possible, and it poses questions about how much pressure the virtual reality medium itself places on the environment. While the empty plates and leftovers keep piling up, the world starts shaking on its foundations.