The announcement of the Amazon Go store last year was met with much anticipation. The concept is a perfect union between the convenience of Amazon and the traditional shopping experience—but without the lines. CNET wrote this colorful piece predicting that the announcement is going to have retailers everywhere scrambling for new ideas, as Amazon continues to threaten brick-and-mortar stores more and more. All you need is your phone…but how does it work exactly?
Originally, it seemed that Amazon was going to use RFID technology to implement their vision, but this isn’t the case, according to GeekWire. According to the announcement video and the patent, Amazon Go relies on computer vision and sensor fusion, the same kind of technology as self-driving cars. Customers with compatible smartphones can tag a reader as they enter the store and simply put items in their bags and walk out.
The fine points of how all the technical components work together are still anyone’s guess, but we know that there are three main components to the system: The entrance and exit, the shelves, and customers’ smartphones.
Entrance and Exit
Based on the patent, the entrance and exit of the store will use 2D barcodes and a “customized” system. Mostly likely, the scanners at the front of the store will need to read a code or detect you in some other way. IDTechEx speculates that facial recognition and GPS may also play a role in confirming your entrance. We can only assume that there will have to be some sort of staff in the store to prevent theft or unpermitted entrance.
Smartphones
We know that the Amazon Go shops will require users to have a supported smartphone and use their app, but that’s all we know so far. Your smartphone is most likely used to track your proximity to individual items and keep track of what’s inside your bag.
Shelves
It’s not really just the shelves that are at work in this component. The patent says that there are “cameras, pressure sensors, infrared sensors, scales, volume displacement sensors, light curtains, etc.” It seems clear that this is where the real magic happens. There are a multitude of sensors that will interact with each other to manage your cart. Based on the patent illustration, it looks like Amazon Go stores are going to have more cameras per square foot than any store in the world; they’ll be on the ceilings, on the shelves, everywhere. The cameras can be used in conjunction with the various weight sensors to recognize products and product removal by customers. It’s been confirmed that if the system fails to recognize what a customer has picked up, the system can look at the user’s account to make an educated guess.
The Amazon Go store is still in beta testing, but we’re probably going to see some more shops open in major cities in 2017. Until there’s more information, we can’t know everything about how the system works, but it’s sure to change the way we shop in the future.