RFID in Japan

People have been talking about RFID-based automatic checkout at retail stores. For example, if all sales items are RFID-tagged, you could just go through a gate with a cart full of sales items, the system reads information about everything in the cart, and automatically charges your credit card (ultimately, you could just put things in your bag or pocket and walk away from the store.) But, it looked like such a scenario belongs to the future rather than today because of the high cost of tags, privacy issues, and the difficulty to accurately read tags.

Here's some ambitious project - FamilyMart, Itochu, and Toshiba Tec unveiled a checkout system that identifies all purchased items at the same time using item-level RFID tags. If customers use RFID payment cards such as SUICA, the checkout process can be done very quickly with this system - it takes only several seconds (more than twice as fast as the conventional checkout processes.)

FamilyMart Co., Itochu Corp. and Toshiba Tec Corp. said Tuesday that they will jointly test their new system to process a large number of purchase items instantaneously using store cash registers between Jan. 30 and Feb. 24 in a project supported by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

A pilot test of this system will start on January 30, 2006 in a real store.

FamilyMart convenience stores plan to use this system in the future.

thanks again regine.

via Kyodo News & Mainichi Shimbun

Posted by konomi at December 22, 2005 02:19 AM | TrackBack