Kinect Grocery Cart Follows You and Helps You Shop Efficiently

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Kinect Grocery Cart Follows You and Helps You Shop Efficiently

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Let's face it, between checking email, tweeting, updating your Facebook status, sending/receiving text messages, taking kids to soccer, etc., every second of our daily lives is precious. So if we can squeeze in a little bit more time via more efficient grocery shopping that leverages a robotic Kinect-camera-enabled grocery cart that stalks you, then by all means.

Microsoft recently demonstrated a prototype of a Kinect-enabled shopping cart that leverages a monitor screen, a motor and a Kinect sensor usually reserved for the popular Xbox 360 console. The shopping cart can recognize a membership card, pull up a customer's shopping list, speak items, offer suggestions, tell you where items are in the store, and scan objects as they are placed in the cart. If you're wondering if you have to use hand gestures to type on a virtual keyboard like you do on the Kinect-enabled Xbox 360 which will no doubt make you look like a crazy fool while shopping -- no worries - it sports speech recognition. So instead of waving your hand you'll instead be talking to your shopping cart. Yeah, that won't draw attention. smiley-tongue-out

Further, it can even detect food allergies as demonstrated in the video below where the grocery card warns Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg that he picked up spaghetti that is not "gluten free" during a demo at Whole Foods:


As for the efficiency, the cart allows customers to immediately pay for their purchases using a stored account, so no need to stand and wait at the checkout line. Now you can avoid the waste-busting junk food candy at the checkout - not to mention the trash tabloid magazines that dumbs down our society. That in itself is worth looking forward to. The future looks brighter already!


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