At the EUREKA Innovation Days in Helsinki we took the opportunity to introduce a working prototype of our Shopping Avatar, Mobile Personal Shopping Assistant, respectively, to a broader public. Our prototype shows how we envision the interaction of customers using a Mobile Shopping Assistant and a Micro Popup Store. At its core is the transfer (“offloading”) of the Mobile Personal Shopping Assistant to the Micro Popup Store. After the Mobile Personal Shopping Assistant is transferred from the mobile device of the customer to the Micro Popup Store, it provides recommendations to the user based on the interests of the customer using the hardware of the Micro Popup Store for interacting with the customer.
On a technical level, we are using bluetooth to make sure that the data transfer doesn’t rely on a WiFi connection. This is a direct consequence of following an EDGE computing architecture where the processing takes place locally in the physical proximity of the customer. It also keeps the data in the vicinity of the user since there is no upload into a cloud-based backend of any sorts.
