Supporting Sales Conversation Using Pointing Gesture Tracking

Meat and cheese counters are among the most important spots in a supermarket where employees interact with customers. Interactions at these counters in supermarkets normally follow a simple protocol. The customer points at an item of choice. The employee takes out the item and, in most of the cases; the product needs to be cut to fit the amount the customer wants to buy. Currently a lot of communication problems happen at these counters due to the distance between the customer and the service staff and the separation by the counter. Often it is ambiguous about what product the customer and the employees are talking about. Up to now, there are just a few efforts in HCI research, to enrich communication at the point of sale. In this paper we report and analyze the interactions and communications at a meat counter and introduce a prototype to ease the communication between customer and employees to higher customer satisfaction and decrease service times. Therefore a depth camera provides information about the products the customers are pointing at and a scale is used as an information display.

http://www.innovative-retail.de

Markus Löchtefeld,Sven Gehring, Johannes Schöning, Florian Daiber, Antonio Krüger

(c) Innovative Retail Lab, DFKI 2011 in cooperation with Bizerba.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• kincet
• touch
• gesture
• pointing
• multi-touch
• fresh
• food
• counter
• microsoft
• irl
• dfki
• kincethacks