IRL SmartCart - a user-adaptive context-aware interface for shopping assistance

Abstract

The electronic market has rapidly grown in the last few years. However, despite this success, consumers still enjoy visiting a "real store with real products". Therefore various common technologies have been installed in supermarkets to support the customer's shopping process and experience. In this paper, we introduce the IRL SmartCart -an instrumented shopping cart that acts as a user interface to support the shopping process. We show how RFID technology enables recognizing products that are put in the cart's basket. We are also able to determine the cart's position in an instrumented shopping environment. User input and visual output are possible by means of a touch screen, which is fitted in the IRL SmartCart's handle to support different tasks involved in the shopping process. We present and discuss different location-and context-based services that run on the cart interface system, e.g. a personalized shopping list sorted corresponding to the products in the user's vicinity or a navigation service to different products that the customer is searching for.

Insights from Deploying See-Through Augmented Reality Signage in the Wild

“…Researchers looked into how the shopping environment could be enhanced using displays, e.g., screens attached to a trolley for navigation in a supermarket [12]. In [13], the user is provided information on how far a product travelled and whether a maximum temperature was exceeded by means of different color LEDs and emoticons.…”

A design space of guidance techniques for large and dense physical environments

“…As such, when the user moves or turns his or her body, the guidance information continues to present the same information. Examples of this type of technique include a mini-map in a videogame, a map [34,24] (Figure 3c); a spotlight on the target [5,41] ( Figure 3b); modifying the target [53] or a beep emitted from the target [26].…”

“…[24,13,48]) for finding objects in such environments. However, the literature does not systematically describe (1) the differences and similarities of these techniques, (2) their relative advantages and drawbacks, and (3) their interactions with the different output modalities and the complexity of the environment.…”

Ambient recommendations in the pop-up shop

“…The Context-Aware Shopping Trolley (CAST) [1] implemented interactive guides to direct shoppers inside supermarkets helping them find groceries. IRL SmartCart [11] is an instrumented shopping cart that uses RFID to detect location inside a supermarket and items placed in the cart providing information via an LCD attached to the trolley. Smart shelves [3], that allow tracking customer behavior in retail stores, have also been developed to understand choice patterns in retail environments.…”