opinion
The future
of kiosks
Everyday someone is coming up with a new IoT Kiosk to
enrich our lives and the future looks bright
By Aaron Reeder, Sales Manager – www.optconnect.com
Each of us is entrenched in the vast
world of technology, whether we know
it or not. Moore’s Law suggests that
computer processing speed doubles
every 18 months. Some experts believe
that gap is narrowing in many tech areas.
On a daily basis, it's not uncommon
for us to encounter new concepts of the
Internet of Things (IoT) applications and
glance over them as if they’ve always
been a part of our lives. The digital sign
outside of your favourite outlet store or
the self-checkout system at your local
hardware store, these are all IoT devices.
Go back fifteen years from now and
it was a print billboard, an in-person
checker, and a cashier sitting in a booth
18 KIOSK solutions
to take your money and let you leave.
These subtle changes are happening
around us every single day and most of
us fail to notice them. IoT is very real and
as a society, we’ll continue to become
reliant on machines to handle many of
our daily activities.
A personal experience
I spent some time in Southern California
recently and had my first encounter with
ordering my McDonald’s food through a
kiosk. In full disclosure, and coming from
someone who is fairly tech savvy, the
process wasn’t as seamless as one would
hope. In a traditional fast food ordering
scenario, you can step up and complete
a detailed order for multiple individuals
and pay for their food all within the
matter of roughly one minute.
To order for two on the kiosk, I had
to identify different sections for the
different types of food, find the exact
item, review the ingredients to add or