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Whole Foods Getting Kinected?

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Whole Foods Getting Kinected?

Published: by Cheat Code Central Staff | Leave a comment

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Whole Foods Market, best known for their organic and expertly-sourced groceries and goods, is looking to take another step forward, on a technical level. Working with Chaotic Moon, a third-party group of developers, they are prototyping shopping carts loaded with Microsoft Kinects. Far from being yet another homebrew hack, this application has been Microsoft-sanctioned, created using the Kinect software development kit for Windows.

The carts in question will be able to identify customers by loyalty card, then follow them around through the store, scanning and identifying items that the customer places in the cart. These items can be checked off of the customer’s digital shopping list by the Kinect, which can even check the shopper out at the end of the trip.



Still in its infancy, these shopping carts still have their kinks, and there’s some uncertainty as to whether or not they’ll prove viable or useful. However, this is an interesting hallmark as perhaps the first non-game, Microsoft-sanctioned, commercial applications for the Kinect sensor, and a compelling demonstration of how it can be applied, creatively, to existing commercial infrastructures. It’s exciting to picture where we could go from here, no?

By Shelby Reiches

The image featured at the top of this post is ©The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III key art.

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