I always feel like somebody's watching me

If you're not at all creeped out by people watching you while you eat and messing with you in subtle ways, I know just the place:

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."

Gee, I wonder what the result will be when they tell the staff to be less friendly.

Anyway, you've got to love the audacity of this project. Most of the time, when you're participating in research, they pay you to participate, not the other way around.