You had a good run, sample ladies. Your ability to slice up frozen pizza or gently stack potato chips in the mini paper cups will not be forgotten. However, the window on your ability to bring bites of meatballs to wholesale club members may be closing rapidly.
Gizmodo brings news of the latest vending machine being test-marketed in Japan, and it's basically a robotic sample lady. A customer can hold up a product's bar code and the machine will spit out a sample for the customer to try.
The machine will also display a series of pop-up infographics about what's
inside the package. The technology behind these machines is called augmented reality (AR), in which computers generate real-time screen displays for kiosks. AR technology can take a picture of you standing in front of a kiosk and show how different outfits might look on you without you having to try them on.
In October, the vending machines were tested in three Japanese supermarkets by the Toppan Printing Company Ltd. Right now it doesn't appear as if they'll be rolled out on a wider scale, but as marketing moves towards mobile phones and signage increasingly becomes digital, it would seem this is what we'll find at the end of the aisle in Costco.
So treasure the sample ladies. One day we'll be telling our children about the crazy system where a stranger handed us a paper cup full of dried fruit and it was the best part of our Saturday.
[Image via Flickr: colros]
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