Intel to Shape the Future of Interactive Shopping, Digital Signage

Upon visiting Intel's booth at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we've had the chance to take a look at quite a few of the company's latest technologies, including a digital signage/information system designed to offer a very impressive level of interactivity.

As you can plainly see from the photos, this system (that we've briefly previously talked about here) was designed specifically for Gillette, but according to one of the company's reps present in the booth, it could be easily adapted for virtually any vendor and any type of products.

So, basically, what this system does is allow users to browse through a company's products in a very simple manner, by simply waving their hand in mid-air, the motion being capture by a special sensor and turned into commands issued to the digital signage system.

Of course, one will have to stand at a per-requisite distance from the device in order for the sensor to work properly, but this is just a minor setback.

It's also worth noting that, should the user pick up one of the items, the system will immediately scan it and provided detailed information related to it (in fact, this solution is advanced enough to even tell whether a male or female customer are in front of the device and display products accordingly).

Plus, the system can also easily analyze the profiles of the people standing in front of it over the course of a day, and offer vendors valuable demographics-related info. 

We'll also have to mention that the whole system also has a very important social media-related component, users being able to download a smartphone application to be used together with the interactive shopping/information system, the app letting them see which of their friends are using the same products, what's their rating for said merchandise and so on.

And the coolest part is that it was all powered by a single Core i7 CPU by Intel, which is quite an impressive feat, to say the least.

While Gillette will apparently start installing such systems in certain of the world's most important shopping venues, we're pretty sure that other retailers will soon follow, and such visual, interactive marketing solutions will become fairly common-place in a couple of year's time (no wonder the guys over at Intel are calling themselves sponsors of tomorrow).