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Japan Makes POS System That Scans Bread Terminator Style

Ah, Japanese bakeries. Rows and rows of delicious, fresh-baked treats ready for you to harvest—if you can decide among all the variety. And if you think choosing which bread to place on your tray is hard (I usually spend at least 5 minutes walking in circles with hungry tongs in hand), imagine how stressful it must be for part-time bakery staff who need to remember the names of every baked good in the store.

Luckily, Japanese web development company Brain Corporation has teamed up with the University of Hyogo to develop a POS system that uses a camera to instantly identify the kind of baked good customers have on their tray.

Check out the video below, it looks a lot more impressive than it sounds.

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The End of Barcodes? Toshiba Unveils Register Scanners that Can See Rather than Scan

I remember on my first day of computer programming class the first thing the teacher said was, “Computers are stupid.”  It was a valuable fact that has served me well in my relationships with these ubiquitous machines.

For instance, if I show a four year old a can of Coke, they can quickly tell me what it is. Whereas for a computer, we have to print a series of lines and numbers on it just so the dumbass box can get up to speed.

It makes you wonder why we have to go through all the trouble of making up barcodes just so a machine can understand what you and I plainly see.  It’s enough to make you think the barcode industry is some sort of insidious freemason plot.  Recently, though, Toshiba has announced a scanner for supermarkets and other shops that will bring this evil syndicate of barcode charlatans to their knees.

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