Checkout-free payments to stay at AFL's Marvel Stadium

Two checkout-free food outlets at Marvel Stadium in Melbourne will continue to use AWS Just Walk Out (JWO) technology after a successful trial.

The Australian Football League (AFL), which owns the stadium, and the owner of the bar and the food booth Delaware North trialled the so-called "frictionless checkout" technology from May until the end of the football season.  

The technology tracks the snacks and drinks that fans pick from shelves and charges them to a registered card.

“It has moved from a trial to a permanent offering at Marvel Stadium,” AFL general manager of technology Rob Pickering told iTnews.

“AFL/Marvel Stadium are extremely pleased with the Just Walk Out functionality, processing over 100,000 transactions at an extremely high accuracy rate with very positive patron feedback since the stores’ inception."

JWO is said to boost revenue by both automating cashiers and allowing more time for fans to purchase food and beverages without queueing in stands at half and quarter time. 

Each fan is assigned a temporary digital signature when tapping their card at the door; visual sensors track their movement across the floor and object recognition identifies the merchandise they pick.

Weight sensors on the shelves detect when shoppers remove smaller items like chewing gum, which are harder to train computer vision to recognise. 

JWO’s computer vision was trained to work in different store layouts, lighting conditions and crowds of shoppers.

To recognise shoppers’ interactions with merchandise across the broadest possible range of scenarios, AWS also used generative adversarial networks to produce its training datasets, feeding JWO millions of artificially produced videos of different shopping situations. 

Some stores in the US use JWO in conjunction with AWS palm identification tool Amazon One, which charges customers to their linked account and also automates ID checks provided the customer has already verified their age.

However, “Amazon One isn’t available in the Asia Pacific region at the moment,” Pickering said.

So fans are still identified with their “credit cards and Apple/Google pay,” rather than hand prints and an employee still checks customers' IDs when they purchase alcohol.  

Although the checkout-free stores have not collected biometric data, the solution has “given Delaware North valuable insights into consumer behaviour,” according to services provider Daemon Solutions, which aided the implementation.

Daemon integrated “JWO and Delaware North's ePOS and stock management solutions,” it said in a statement.  

“By connecting ePOS with the company’s stock ordering system, we’ve allowed them to analyse buying habits and ensure that the right products are shipped.”

JWO has been deployed at more than 85 locations in the US, UK, and Australia, including sports stadiums, airports, grocery stores, convenience stores and retail stores.

Yesterday, the Canberra Institute of Technology Student Association became the first educational institution in the Southern Hemisphere to adopt JWO, deploying it at the YalaPlus Convenience Store at the Bruce Campus.