A fierce man has developed 'DropOfAHat Zone' using AI to realize true window shopping where you can buy things just by standing under a window for 3 seconds



Engineer James Steinberg is developing ' DropOfAHat Zone, ' which uses AI to detect hats above the heads of people walking outside the window and automatically drops them. Steinberg pointed out that this system will lead to true window shopping, and boasted that 'with DropOfAHat Zone, even busy New Yorkers can enjoy shopping in just one minute.'

I am using AI to automatically drop hats outside my window onto New Yorkers
https://dropofahat.zone/



Steinberg, who lives in downtown New York City, came up with the idea for the DropOfAHat Zone after seeing someone drop a parachute-attached lock from an eighth- or ninth-story window, and someone below picking it up and climbing into the building.

The actual DropOfAHat Zone automatically drops hats to passersby outside as shown below.




A camera mounted outside the window detects people passing by.



Detects human heads.



After three seconds have passed since the head was detected, the hat will be dropped.



Passersby were able to get hats.



What is needed to realize the DropOfAHat Zone is a window (for dropping a hat), a hat (for dropping), a machine (for dropping a hat), and an AI (for deciding to drop a hat). Regarding the hat, Steinberg wrote, 'It had to be a hat that wouldn't hurt anyone or fly out onto the road when it fell,' and 'It had to be a design that symbolized the future. It had to be beautiful, gracefully falling from the window onto your head.' It seems that the hat that met this condition was a colorful propeller hat like the one below.



The machine for dropping the hat was created using a Raspberry Pi, a stepper motor, and a camera gimbal. A stepper motor is attached to the camera gimbal, and when the AI determines that a human is standing at the specified position and ready to receive the hat, it rotates the motor to cut the string attached to the hat, causing the hat to fall.




'The AI for 'a human standing at the specified position and ready to receive the hat' was completed surprisingly quickly,' Steinberg said. First, a camera was installed on a camera gimbal for the AI and a picture of the road outside the window was taken. Then, the AI model was asked to perform object detection using the captured footage to detect 'pedestrians not wearing hats.' 'If there was a person on the correct part of the sidewalk, we dragged a box around it, and if not, we marked it as 'null,'' Steinberg wrote.

The AI model created by Steinberg is available below.

Drop of aa hat Dataset > Overview
https://universe.roboflow.com/test-y7opj/drop-of-aa-hat



Then, if the AI determines that a person is standing in the correct position for three seconds, a program is created in Python to call the Raspberry Pi. This completes the DropOfAHat Zone.

'There are so many people walking around outside my window. There are so many people who are not wearing hats even though they are in the sun. I think DropOfAHat Zone will be the precursor to many window-based stores. In DropOfAHat Zone, busy New Yorkers can reserve a five-minute time slot, pay for a hat, and stand under my window for three seconds. The hat will then fall. Even busy New Yorkers can easily enjoy shopping in less than a minute,' Steinberg said. He added, 'Imagine a world where you just walk around New York City and everything you need falls out of your window. This is the world I want to live in. Remember, this is real window shopping,' he said, emphasizing that DropOfAHat Zone will bring a new shopping experience.

In addition, if you access dropofahat.zone and click 'Stop window shopping and start window shopping!' at the bottom right of the screen, you can actually purchase a colorful propeller hat. However, at the time of writing, the 5-minute time frame for purchasing hats was filled with reservations until the end of July, and reservations for August were not available at the time of writing.



'DropOfAHat Zone is fully booked and we need more hats,' Steinberg wrote on X.




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in Software,   Video, Posted by logu_ii