Roamer
The Smart Shopping Cart
For my Design for Behavior and Experience class in the Spring 2024 semester, one of the projects I worked on was Roamer. Looking at objects and experiences from a gestural perspective, we decided to research the use of a shopping cart using simple gestures. We realized that the shopping cart has had very little improvement in the past decade, and felt that by injecting gestures into the cart, we could create a better overall shopping experience for the consumer.
Research
To begin our project we began by running through a typical shopping experience. From our initial visit we found an interesting insight. Gesture can be used to indicate where we want the cart to go, but also to indicate to others where the cart wants to go. We do this so naturally when maneuvering around that it can be easy to miss, but going through this process opened our eyes to the ways in which gestures can be used to both guide the cart and others around us. For example we noticed a simple cart turn conveyed information to others about my intended direction, as well as motions like pausing and waving. Using gestures as communication tools was an invaluable insight gained through this visit.
From this visit, we took the actions used to move around and looked for ways to turn these into gestures that a smart cart could see and respond to. Some of our initial ideas looked like this:
To narrow these down we wanted to go back out and do another round of testing and see what gestures were truly necessary to make the cart function. We did this by having me act as the smart cart and my partner act as the customer. In the end we realized we only needed two gestures to communicate between the user and the cart. A tug to start moving, and the customer stopping to indicate that the cart needed to stop. It was important to us not to make the gesture list too complicated or unnecessary as ease of use is very important.
Final Product
Presentation
Here is our final presentation on this project. Here you can find more of our concepts, takeaways, and an AR model of the cart I created to place in physical space. Check it out!