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Comment by jackhalford | Hacker News Reader

But how does it work?

The article only mentions that you scan your phone at the entrance. The tags don't seem to be RFID or anything special neither.

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Amazon claims cameras automatically track what you take and put back. But if that's the case, then I'm left confused as to why receipts take so long (15-20 mins+ sometimes) to be generated after leaving the stores?

Is it possible it's actually a manual process of people watching the videos, or more likely identifying what happened at each "take off shelf/put on shelf" point?

They're still just building up the customer base, training data and models and it's not as magical as it all seems?

They need to wait till not only you leave the ship, but also all people who were near you when you picked or returned any item. Then they can use that to resolve ambiguities ("one of these 3 people took this item which is now missing from the shelf, who was it")

Is your observation based on multiple samples? Or just a couple of casual visits? Would be interesting to know their real median receipt generation time.

Their patent [1] describes how it works. A nice summary is provided in [2].

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US10001402B1/en [2] https://www.geekwire.com/2018/fresh-patents-served-smart-she...

I wrote about it back when they showed off the first one here in Seattle. Not sure how much they've updated it but it's largely RGB cameras in the ceiling and weight sensors in the shelves:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/21/inside-amazons-surveillanc...

Closer inspection of the shelves in the London store shows regular cheap steel shelving units with no weight sensors visible anywhere.

Either the weight sensors are very well hidden, or there aren't any.

a bit of googling found a better article thats shows the cameras and sensors on the ceiling do the work.

https://www.google.fr/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-...

Is that a critique of the article or are you unable to find that out online?

I just found it, see sibling.

Not a critique, honest curiosity.

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