In this edition of our Kinect column, talk about operating rooms and party games has been put aside in favor of managing editor Alaina Yee taking a closer look at an unusual place for Kinect to pop up: Bloomingdale's.
In terms of news, Kinect usually crops up in the expected ways — either the buzz revolves around upcoming releases (these days, it’s Kinect Star Wars) or yet another way the wonder-device is being used to improve the human condition (be it for medicine or science).
What we don’t usually see much of are the stop-and-make-you-blink instances — stuff you never anticipated, like the event put on by department-store-chain Bloomingdale’s this past weekend, where customers were invited to scan their bodies to help them with pants sizing.
Yup, that’s right: the same device used to help detect when elderly residents of a nursing home might be more prone to a fall is being utilized to help you find a pair of jeans you can actually squeeze into. You enter a pod in your skivvies, let eight Kinect cameras scan you from every angle, then get a report on what body type you are. At that point, retail associates descend upon you with suggestions of what to buy.
(Here’s a video of how the process works, as demoed by a model who looks like nothing could ever be small enough to fit her, period.)
The scanning pods are the product of Bodymetrics, a UK-based company with the goal of revolutionizing the process of finding clothes that fit — and in particular, finding clothes that fit while shopping online. Their US debut of the technology began last Thursday, and ran until this past Sunday at a Los Angeles-area Bloomingdale’s, in which customers were scanned and categorized into one of three types, then given recommendations on which particular pair of designer jeans would work best for them.
The closest thing that this process has to do with gaming is that, as tech blog Technabob wryly noted in their write-up about the event, the names of those categories — emerald, sapphire, and ruby — sound like a collection of Pokémon GameBoy Advance titles. And while it certainly involves technology (the engineering of the pods are really what piqued our interest, initially), Kinect isn’t being used for the purpose of furthering tech or other knowledge.
So why is this of note? Well, for one, it’s pretty random. (And you guys know how fond I am of surprising uses for Kinect, since we’re not seeing much growth just yet on the gaming side of things.) But I also think there’s something to be said for seeing Kinect pop up in something as utterly mainstream as shopping: questions that have been pretty vaguely dealt with in the gaming arena — such as privacy — seem to take on a much greater significance when in a broader, more universal context.
Take that privacy concern, for example. Kinect gaming helped spawn the Pritect, a black plastic cover for your favorite motion-sensing peripheral. But most everyone has a pretty casual attitude toward the thought of being spied on — those who really care either leave Kinect unplugged when not in use, or throw a towel over it. (Or in the case of Corey, they get creative and turn it around backwards.)
But in the case of these body-scanning pods, they exist for the explicit purpose of retailers making money from you. (So you can’t sleep easier at night thinking that, as in the case of research, companies are accumulating and possibly sharing extremely private data about your person for the common good.) Sure, Bloomingdale’s and Bodymetrics could promise to not share that info with anyone. But as we’ve seen countless times with other forms of intimate data, companies don’t always play by the rules. Or, they get hacked.
Right now, it’s not entirely clear what Kinect will be used for in the future. And, I’ll be honest, I can’t say the idea of seeing it used so I can spend $200 on premium denim is much more than a neat trick. (I’ll admit I’m not Bloomingdale’s target audience.) But I will say, after seeing this particular news blurb crop up, I’m curious to see what other odd place Kinect will surface next — and how it’ll get me thinking.
