Experimental Crocs Store In Tokyo Brings You Shoes With Drone

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If you’ve always thought that shoe stores would be improved by replacing salespeople with drones, well, you’re going to have to wait a while before you can experience your dream. The technology apparently isn’t quite here yet. As a promotion for a new shoe line, Crocs has a store in Tokyo where customers tap on a pair of shoes on an iPad, and a green Crocs-branded drone fetches the item and brings it to them.

This sounds pretty cool, but reports from the press event are that it doesn’t work 100% of the time. The drone has to hook a clip that holds the shoes in pairs with a dangling magnet, and sometimes it fails to grab the shoes. Also, there’s the important flaw that the store space is just a shoe-fetching promotion: Engadget points out that shoppers have to actually buy the slip-on sneakers somewhere else.

While the FAA is still not keen on deliveries using unmanned aircraft, maybe shuttling items within a store or within a building is a fun and even useful application for drones. Just keep it away from reporters’ faces.

Here’s a video of one of the test runs last week:

Here’s a longer demonstration that’s more realistic:

Flying Norlin Project [Crocs] (via Engadget)

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist