How Kinect could end up in your grocery store

Update at 2/29/12, 3:43 p.m.: A spokesman from Chaotic Moon Studios, the developers of the Kinect-enabled cart, has offered some extra tidbits on the project.

Marketing director Jonathan Carroll says the studio reached out to Whole Foods after developing the cart for help with testing. However, there aren't any plans to bring these carts to Whole Foods in the near future.

"It is a very early project, one which is truly in testing and prototyping," says Carroll. "There is no implementation schedule for in-store use currently."

As for certain functions such as reading loyalty cards, Whole Foods doesn't offer that option, but Carroll adds carts could be enabled for that type of experience.

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Video game players might see some familiar technology show up in grocery stores soon: the Xbox 360 Kinect.

Tech site GeekWire reports Whole Foods is testing a special shopping cart equipped with the motion sensor from Microsoft. Here's a description of what the high-tech cart can do:

"The motorized cart identifies a shopper with a loyalty card, follows the shopper around the store, scans items as they're placed inside, marks them off the shopping list, and even checks the shopper out in the end."

GeekWire has also posted a video of the demo, conducted by Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie at the company's campus in Redmond, Wash.

It's not clear when Whole Foods will start deploying Kinect-enabled shopping carts at stores.

Although Kinect has been featured primarily as an entertainment device, the sensor has found life in other fields. The sensor is now available for Windows PCs, and according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer during his keynote at last month's Consumer Electronics Show, companies including Boeing, Siemens and Toyota are creating Kinect software.