Whole Foods is working with developer Chaotic Moon and Microsoft to develop a shopping cart that is powered by Kinect technology, the same Kinect for Xbox 360 and PCs used to track body movements and respond to voice commands.
The plan is for the cart to use the Kinect’s camera to scan a shopper’s loyalty card and then using motorized wheels, follow them around the store based on the sound of their voice and the position of the shopper’s body. As the shopper selects items, the cart will scan them, marking them off a virtual grocery list. The technology will even allow the customer to pay for the items, all from the aisle.
Any one of the millions of Xbox 360 owners who added a Kinect sensor bar to their console knows that this idea will not work. Kinect cannot even tell when I complete a jumping jack. How will it know to follow me in a busy produce department on a Saturday afternoon?
Imagine what would happen if more than one person used the technology at a time. If anything that moves comes into the Kinect’s line of sight, it disrupts the calibration, which causes the system to “guess” at where you are and what is happening. That means a quick trip to the store to buy pasta sauce will become a veritable demolition derby of ridiculously priced shopping carts in the International Foods Section.
The technology is still a ways off, and obviously there are issues that will need to be worked out. The Whole Food-Shopping-Cart-Disaster-of-the-Future is only one of many applications being developed for the Kinect technology. Maybe if these same brilliant minds went to work actually making the Kinect lag-and-bug-free for the game system it was designed for, my Fruit Ninja Kinect scores would be higher.
There is no word if the shopping cart comes with a free copy of Kinect Adventures.
Source: Geekwire
