2y ago

What is this camera like thing on electronic shop price tags? (And how does it work)

I first thought it was a camera but there was no point, After some searching I found that these things could communicate optical,, so that might be it, if so how do they work?

20 comments

It looks like an infrared receiver.
The general principle of these tags is explained in the Wikipedia article about electronic shelf labels.
You have shown us a Pricer label.
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- Good bot
  
  Very smart bot, almost seems like a human
  
  “Everyone on Lemmy is a bot except you”
Some of the stores near me have LEDs in the tags so if you're looking for something and ask an employee they can look it up and turn on the light.
The price tag then flashes so you can find it easier.
- A store near me (Canadian Tire) has them linked to their app - you find what you want in the app, go to the aisle listed and tap "find this item" and the LED flashes.
  
  That's a great feature, because their employees are fucking useless for knowing where things are.
The top white rectangle is a multi-color LED (presumably RGB). Can't make out what's in the bottom, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was some form of light sensor for (literally) flashing new information onto the tag.
- Yup. They use ceiling-mounted IR transmitters that are a bit like a big multi-directional TV remote control.
  
  I'm pretty certain these ones use visible light, with ceiling-mounted LEDs. They flash at specific frequencies that are imperceptible to the human eye, but can be interpreted by the electronic shelf label. Here's a whitepaper explaining the concept.
  Source: for 20 or so years, I worked in technology for some of Australia's largest retailers, and we tested a lot of these sorts of things in our labs. Very cool stuff.
My off the cuff thought is that it may be used to change the content on the tags. Show it a specific QR code and it updates the content.
They cynical side of wants to believe that it's being used to gather shopping analytics and correlate it to facial data.
- These run on coin cells and have very little power. It is literally just an IR receiver.
  Not everything is there to spy on you.
Probably an IR receiver module or photodiode.

20 comments