Shopping Carts Powered by a Video Game System? It Could Happen

From the creators of the Board of Awesomeness -- a skateboard controlled by Microsoft's Kinect that we showed you last month -- comes a slightly more practical use of the technology. Chaotic Moon Labs has tricked out a grocery store cart with the motion-sensing system and has begun testing it out in Whole Foods.

Wired reports that the "Smarter Cart" made its prototype debut recently in an Austin, Texas, Whole Foods store where it not only followed shoppers around, but could lead them to food they may have had a hard time finding. Here are some of its featured uses:

Using RFID, (Radio-frequency identification) the tablet can read items off of a smart-card shopping list, and then make recommendations to shoppers, using a speech and voice recognition as the interface. Smarter Cart can even offer up recipes and catch shopping mistakes (did you want low-fat or no-fat yogurt?).

Watch the demo of the Smarter Cart:

GeekWire reports that kinks still have to be worked out of the "literally weeks old" project before it will become your second shadow down grocery store aisles. GeekWire also notes Microsoft is currently working with more than 300 companies to help make their dreams for Kinect technology a reality.

[H/T PC World]