The Brief

Tools: Arduino board Motion Sensors LED Lights LCD Display Screen Mac Mini Choosing competing products in a retail store can sometimes be a frustrating experience when product descriptions read the same and there's only price to differentiate. Most technology savvy consumers are already bringing up their mobile phones to check product reviews and receive suggestions from the wider community. iShelf integrates suggestions into the retail experience by presenting shoppers with matching advertisements, bundle suggestions and reviews of the product they touch on a display screen attached to the shelf. The technology is at Beta stage and has been showcased at a global retail forum in May 2014.

Intention/Purpose: The innovation helps shoppers make more informed choices during their point of purchase and empowers retail stores to upsell and cross-sell products, increasing the shopping cart size per customer. The technology was created as part of a showcase at a global retail forum in May 2014 and was made to help retail clients who wish to embrace technology and create better shopper experiences in their stores. We realised that the retail store has spots with under-utilised media spaces and discovered that we could marry the technology habits of a mobile savvy shopper into the shopping experience so that it may benefit all shoppers. The technology is a completely new innovation. Each shelving unit is connected to an Arduino board and small LCD screen. The motion sensors are programmed to detect the position of the hand and the "taking the product" gesture, which feeds the information to the Mac Mini running proprietary software. As a result of these shopper actions, the lights (connected to the Arduino) react to the action of the shopper and the display screen (connected to the Mac Mini) plays different pre-rolled video and image based on the action. e.g. touching a bag of potato chips on the iShelf may trigger the potato chip ad to play while taking the bag of potato chips will trigger an image of a 2-pack bundle promotion. Our team's hired full-time developer controls the technology stack. The technology have gathered interest from the agency clients and are in discussion to be rolled out in retail stores. The technology received investment from the agency's internal R&D budget.

We intend to sell the technology to retail clients interested in doing a custom trial run in selected stores. The technology is expected to allow store owners to monetise from shelves with the technology installed. It also helps create better brand to shopper engagement through the experience of providing relevant information at the point of purchase. Non-technology savvy shoppers can benefit too. We have an actual working prototype in the office. Several Twitter users have tweeted about the technology in the past months and we've received multiple enquiries to trial the technology around the world.