Struggling supermarket giant Tesco has become the first major UK retailer to launch a Google Glass shopping app.
Tesco Labs, which models itself as being "here to help you experience the future", is behind the app, which it describes as a "basic" version of its Grocery app, available on iOS and Android.
The new offering appears to be genuinely useful -- that is,
if you have Glass strapped do your face 24/7. Which of course, you mainly don't.
With Grocery Glassware you can browse Tesco products, look at nutritional information and add items to a basket with a few verbal commands and taps. Around six months ago the supermarket chain posted a concept video to Vimeo demonstrating how its Glass app might work. It shows a woman making herself a cup of coffee, realising the milk is low, and thus scanning the bottle's barcode and ordering it for delivery. As if by magic, a Tesco delivery van arrives with the new milk. Obviously it's missing the pesky bit in between where you stock up the rest of your basket online, probably using a more natural interface such as a tablet, desktop or smartphone. Its use case is really in last minute additions that you think of on the fly, when there is no other device to hand, so there's no chance of you forgetting to add the item later.
Pablo Coberly, Innovation Engineer at Tesco Labs explains: "At Tesco we want to ensure we have the means in place to allow customers to shop whenever, however they want which is why we're testing the possibilities of customers topping up their online basket with Glass."
He admits there's no chance of Glass replacing other devices that we would more often go to for online shopping, since "its functionality is different, and more immediate". In fact, it seems as though customers can't actually order online using Glass -- according to a press release on the launch, they'd have to log back on to their Tesco account using the aforementioned devices to do that.
The launch is still very much an experiment to see how consumers react to and use the app and Glass in general. Which is fair enough, considering it is very early days yet. However, it's likely a system like this will become rapidly redundant as the internet of things begins to take hold. We won't want to have to tell our Tesco account that we are low on milk -- in one of the most common examples of what our connected world will look like, our fridge will automatically add milk to our online basket, check our Google calendar and book in a delivery slot for that week's grocery shop.
It's still an interesting experiment from one of the world's biggest supermarket chains, particularly at a time when it is struggling financially, having admitted to a £263m miscalculation in profits last year. Last week the chain's new chief executive announced the potential closure of 100 stores. Big retailers will need to experiment with new functionality and delivery models like this one, if they are to retain control of a market that is shifting ever closer to one that is highly consumer-centric and on-demand.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
