If you’ve made it to the grocery store, are hungry, lost and have no clue what to cook for dinner…no worries: Kraft’s latest gimmick will rescue you from the culinary pits of despair.
They have recently create a face-scanning vending machine that will read your face, (stereotype you?), and tell you what to make for dinner…and get you to buy Kraft products.
The machine scans your face and suggests possible meals based on your gender, age and mood. It can also dispense appropriate samples, and if you aren’t impressed yet, it can even take your photo and put it on a bobble head…yes, a virtual bobble head.
This is cool from a technological standpoint, and such computer that could help one plan a meal in the grocery store could also have some value, but how much can the machine know from scanning a face? Would the machine know that I want a meal without meat or cheese? That I don’t like raw tomatoes? Would it know that I don’t particularly care for pre-packaged Kraft meals? I mean, how much science did they actually put into it besides borrowing some facial recognition code?
I’d also like to know how far it goes. Does it stereotype meal preferences by weight, by race? Will it turn me in for facecrime?
Anyway, the idea of such a machine is entertaining, and here’s a video showing some features of the new vending machine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3D9mme8aAQ
Photo credit: Flickr Creative Commons by srboisvert
70% of people enter the grocery store with no idea of what to make for dinner that night? There’s our first problem…
Now, if Mark Bittman and Michael Pollan were to program one of these, it might be a little less disturbing…although they wouldn’t need face recognition to do it…
I find this creepy. Anyone else?