Microsoft Want Kinect Used to Recognise Shoppers, Minority Report-Style

Microsoft has proposed using its Kinect hardware in stores to recognise customers and track their shopping habits. The idea was put forward in a Microsoft blog post on Monday, entitled 2015: The Year of On-demand, Personalized Shopping.

Kinect, the motion controller for Xbox 360 and Xbox One, is able to identify faces, discern facial expressions, track body and limb movements, and recognise voice commands. Microsoft believes the technology could revolutionise how retailers engage with their customers. From Microsoft’s blog:

The NEC Biometric interface with Kinect Camera system provides demographic and face recognition services to a Kinect enabled application. Retailers can use this information for analysis and for providing the customer with a more personal selling experience. MediaCart will change the shopping cart as we know it. Adding a location-aware tablet to the cart allows a retailer to present a personal and relevant shopping experience to its customer. This allows context sensitive ads and promotions when in front of various products along with a barcode scanning capability for price lookups and basket totals.

The small matter of whether customers will stand for being tracked, catalogued, and spied on, however, isn’t broached in the blog entry.

Source: Business Insider