Imagine the future of shopping with HoloLens and Microsoft Azure…

As I am extremely lazy (hence I love automation to kill repetitive boring tasks and I’m in IT !!), every time I go shopping with my shopping list I am facing the following question:

“Wouldn’t that be that great to have an application that tells me the optimized path to shop everything I need in a minimum amount of time ?”

Lets dream slightly to think about an App on a mobile phone :

• You would have entered before-hand a shopping list (on the left below)
• The apps would walk you through the supermarket thanks to arrows modeled on the telephone
• Whenever you reach a product present on my shopping list, it is highlighted;
  • each product would have a RFID tag, so that the App knows precisely its price, its ingredients (handy for allergies or specific diet), the total cost of my cart, …

A better version with V2

• Now as you are approaching and facing articles, the application knows you are allergic to a given ingredients or that you want a “full fat free”. Hence, it automatically scores it out non matching items and highlights relevant ones!
  That would be such a great amount of time spared !!
• Then you keep on following the green arrows (notice you have on the top left hand side, a small top-view map of your location in the supermarket)

An even better version with V3 and in 2015
Now we are in the near future,

• instead of using the small mobile phone,
• or instead of picking a Gen-Code reader at the entrance of your supermarket

With the usage of HoloLens, you would be able to walk in your supermarket:

• according to an optimized path,
• picking up rapidly, without spending hours in reading all ingredients (allergies or specific diet),
• as you pickup the articles, you would visualize tons of information related to the product (may be cheaper prices with 5 miles), all those information flies toward Microsoft Azure into a centralized datastore where AI and anonymized recommandations could be performed,
• have the total of your bill all summed up for you, with the corresponding discounts if applicable.

  

Final version with V4 and in 2016 … This is the laziest variant of it !
Imagine all this, sitting comfortably in your sofa ! while watching TV for instance or doing gym! and get the order delivered for you ! All this would be powered by Microsoft Azure with its IoT offering, where the Azure Machine Learning would be offered as a service and will predict you your needs !!
Well this dream is not that far, with :

• HoloLens, MS Azure, Machine Learning, EventHubs, Stream Analytics, IoT and Windows 10 !

Remixed image © Bretz Marilyn licensed under the Creative Commons Cultsofa
Then you’ll have more time to go out, enjoy meeting real people, and have fun… away from those technologies ;-)