The future always ushers in plenty of hope, and ever since 2009, the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) has been hard at work on a futuristic concept known as the Ubiquitous Market (UbiMart if your tongue gets a bit tired), where it will make use of networked robots and sensors to help you out during your purchases. The current system is undergoing tests in a mock convenience store, where it will track your shopping habits within, recording the kind of items that you purchase before analyzing them to deliver product recommendations as well as provide directions to your preferred items down the road. Those items which are not available at your current shopping location will be filtered out automatically. In a nutshell, we’re looking at a smarter shopping experience.
Those who tend to rush off here and there would appreciate the Ubiquitous Market concept, since the system can know who is in a hurry based on how quickly they move, delivering preferential treatment to them at various counters – sounds like cheating to me.
Just how do you think your shopping experience would be like in the future? Is it something that is worth having computers and robots figure out what we like? Too bad by then, the experience would have gotten so sterile that we can’t be shocked by new items on store shelves any more since everything has been laid down for us before we even step foot inside.
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