Kinect powers future shopping carts

French Tribune writes.

All consumers need to do is upload their shopping lists and enjoy pouring their favourite items freely into the cart.

According to DVice, the cart utilises the Kinect and other sensors to read what consumers are placing in the cart and check whether the item matches their pre-planned menu and any dietary constraints.

This self-driving test cart is only offered in Austin for now and has been tested by roughly 30 customers, but that number is expected to grow when the software developers, Austin-based Chaotic Moon, will begin testing more than one cart at a time at a grocery store starting in April, Red Orbit notes.

Chaotic Moon says the project is literally weeks old, and that was apparent in the demo, which included a couple of false starts where the sensor did not precisely identify the item.

Smarter Cart is an interesting application that shows what outside developers can do now that a Kinect software development kit has been released for Windows, expanding the sensor beyond the Xbox 360 game console.