If you’ve dreamed of a day when your shopping cart could slowly stalk you, as you peruse the aisles at your local Whole Foods, Microsoft is one step ahead of you. The company recently demonstrated a prototype of a Kinect-enabled shopping cart. Employing a monitor, a motor and a Kinect sensor, the cart can recognize a membership card, pull up a customer’s shopping list and scan objects as they are placed in the cart. What’s more, the cart will dutifully follow a customer around the store.
As demonstrated in the video above, the cart can even identify user preferences — in this case, warning Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg that he picked up the wrong type of spaghetti (apparently he’s going gluten free). Best of all, the cart allows customers to immediately pay for their purchases using a stored account, thus negating the need to stand in the checkout line (unless you want help bagging your groceries … but you brought your own bags, right?).
We’re all for a future of hyper-intelligent (and hyper-expensive) shopping carts but, if said future doesn’t include checkout lines, how will we keep up with the life and times of Angelina Jolie?
Microsoft demonstrates Kinect-enabled shopping cart originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 27 Feb 2012 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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