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Let's say Fry's (a big electronics chain) makes their inventory accessible over the net. The stuff on the shelves and the inventory differ;
how do you figure out what is actually there without relying on sales assistance? Users logged in via the web get little
periscope-headed drones to wheel around
the store. Once a drone gets in the general area of the thing the buyer wants, it can be
made to "blink", attracting the intereste of one of the customers in the area. The drone has a mike/speaker or terminal that can be used
to talk back to the person wishing to purchase something. The rest is social interaction between two customers.
(That's probably not world's best use of drones, but I would like to pry computer-mediated interaction from the stasis it right now
demands from its participants; terminals that can come up to you and blink at you sound like a step in the right direction.)
[later]
I agree with the basic thrust of comments that having real people and/or an accurate online inventory would be preferable to this (other than for hack value), but Fry's specifically is a store whose inventory is hopelessly inaccurate (frequently you'll open a box to find the thing inside be a slightly different model from the one on the box),and many of whose employees are spectacularly clueless compared to the geeky customers. (They are much snappier dressers, though.)
The idea came out of thinking about what single, localized gizmo one could add to the stores to allow remote access without forcing them to clean up the basic problems.
Surface Cruiser PRoPs
http://www.prop.org/cart/
Eric Paulos has already built the thing you want. It can be controlled from a Java applet in your web browser. Now, get Fry's to buy into the idea! [Eeyore, Jan 10 1999]
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Amazon.com and several other large online stores actually link their inventory database to their websites, so customers actuall get realtime data on what's available (theoretically, anyway). |
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Instead of drones, though, they actually have stock people. Nice, because it means jobs. |
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I recently saw a news story about some big store had these guys in the store on roller blades with a laptop and web cam strapped to thier chest. You could somehow get hooked up to one of these guys over the web and ask them to show you something...they would then skate on over to womens undergarments or whatever and hold things up to the camera for you. |
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I am not sure how a shakey, low-rez image of a new suit is better then the professional picture taken for the online catalog. |
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Why use a perfectly good telepresent robot for something that can be accomplished with a trusty illegal immigrant and a cell phone? Another reason the idea is bad is that robots don't have pockets, so no more five finger discounts. In any case, this is completely baked since you can buy all sorts of telepresent robots, they are just marketed toward office settings. But I agree with the sentiment of staying as far away from Fry's as possible. |
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Wierd. I think, if it worked, it would work. Like, who wants to be interrupted by a robot while they're shopping? You know you're helping someone, but it's a robot standing there. Robots are easy to despise, because they are super-impersonal. But sometimes the customers do know more than the workers, I know that. So it could work. But what about this: People shop online when the actual store is still closed. They don't have to go when it's open, part of the internet shopping attraction. But I give it a + anyway. I like it. |
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No thanks I'm amish
[Additional] what about the less technically inclined of us... a mere joystick for control or a mouse and keyboard? And another thing... you can only have so many drones :) However I have heard of a company that made a virtual store...
But it is a WAY cool idea... |
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A much more effective solution would just be to improve inventory tracking with RFID tags to ensure an exact record at every moment of the shelf contents, even of things out of place. |
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