Consumers often need additional information to decide which products would best suit their needs. This information is in practice limited due to limited space, limits of human attention, large number of products, etc. On the other hand, any approach to provide any kind of information to the customer is effective only if it does not require excessive user involvement. As a solution to offer only relevant information with minimal customer engagement we propose our vision of interactive shelves. The general idea is to observe the customer interaction with the products in order to recognize customer interests and display relevant information on. At the moment the observation of interaction is achieved by using passive infrared sensors (PIR) and ultrasound distance measuring sensors (US) to detect user grabbing or pointing to products. The system could be extended with camera and gaze detection to avoid the need of physical contact.

Rogelj, Peter. “Informing Costumers via Interactive Shelves.” Human-Computer Interaction–INTERACT 2015. Springer International Publishing, 2015. 559-562.

Additional information (in Slovenian) and photos can be found on Famnit’s web page.