Courtesy of GeekWire: here’s a pretty interesting demo of the “shopping cart of the future” being developed in prototype form for Whole Foods. This shopping cart uses Microsoft Kinect and voice recognition (and other tech) to maintain the shopper’s list, scan products, follow you around the store and check out.
This is just the latest in a series of “smart shopping carts” that offer convenience and various marketing and CRM opportunities. The screen could prompt with coupons or ads, for example. There’s something both compelling and horrifying about this — like a supermarket version of R2D2 following you around the store.
While it’s unlikely that this particular cart will see mass production, some version of all this will likely come to market at some point. One can easily imagine many humorous and awkward scenarios as the cart announced your purchases to the world: toiletries, feminine hygiene products, condoms, medicines, junk food, etc. I could imagine that the cart could even be made to shame you when you scanned something unhealthy.
The GeekWire piece also points out Microsoft reports “more than 300 companies are working on commercial applications for Kinect on Windows.” I’m sure there will be some pretty interesting applications.
Four years ago I wrote about another Microsoft smart grocery cart initiative involving RFID tags: Microsoft And MediaCart Bring Ad Targeting To Grocery Store Shopping Carts.
February 28th, 2012 at 10:20 pm
The idea of using Kinnect for shopping would, in my opinion, be better suited to vastly improving the home shopping experience.
At the moment you have to go to a supermarket, find a car park, walk through the supermarket (with screaming kids in tow), and line up at the check out.
Imagine if you could use Kinnect to virtually walk through the supermarket, walking down each isle choosing which products you need, and then checking out at the virtual cashier. Then see everything that you ordered appear on your doorstep that day, or the next.
Now that would be a shopping experience!
February 29th, 2012 at 6:13 am
Hello Greg,
This is one of those Jetsons-esque developments that leaves me saying, “Do we really need this?” I’m far from being a technophobe, but honestly, I’m capable of shopping without the aid of an electronic shopping cart. And it’s just one more way to cut down on staff…like the self checkouts appearing with greater frequency at local supermarkets. The idea is interesting, but I’m not really seeing it as solving any problems. Now…if it could guarantee that Whole Foods always had organic button mushrooms in stock…that’s another matter.
February 29th, 2012 at 7:29 am
Miriam: I think the creative application of the Kinect technology is interesting here but I agree that there might be some undesirable outcomes if this were to be implemented broadly