Future tech: Kinect shopping trolley trialed

Your weekly food shop could get a whole lot techier with a Kinect shopping trolley. US supermarket Whole Foods is trialling a Kinect-powered shopping trolley at one of its stores.

Scan your loyalty card and the shopping trolley will follow you around the shop. Add a shopping list and it will check off the products as you add them using a built-in scanner. The trolley also reads out your purchases in an unsettling robot voice. Helpful? Yes. Unless you're shopping for toilet rolls.

As well as knowing its way around the store, the trolley also recognises what ingredients are packed into the products you're buying – tell it you're allergic to milk and it'll warn you if you throw a dairy product into the basket.

The Kinect shopping trolley is still at the early stages of development, as you can see from the video below. But if the bugs are ironed out, supermarket shopping could get a lot more entertaining.

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