Loogaroo came to us with big plans to automate the cannabis dispensary check in and retail experience
Loogarou, the cannabis dispensary and consultancy group have ambitions to create the ultimate cannabis dispensary retail experience. This concept includes the latest technology and leveraging data, to enable seamless experiences for customers.
The first part of this experience is seamless check-in to a store. With the cannabis industry being highly regulated, customers must have their ID verified before they can shop in a store. Needing to have a member of staff available to do this all the time is costly, and can lead to friction if they are otherwise occupied. A person checking ID’s means there is one less person on the shop floor assisting customers. Compoze Labs were tasked with automating this process by creating a check in kiosk using facial recognition and ID scanning technology.
The three main elements of the check in kiosk comprised of Thales ID scanners, Thales facial recognition, and a customer facing tablet based user interface (UI). All of these technologies needed to be integrated with each other to in order for the experience to be seamless for the customer.
It was very important for both us and Loogaroo that the check in kiosk and experience could be easily customised and adapted as we learn from the release of the Minimal Viable Product (MVP) and the customer response. The most important factor in this was in ensuring we had a development process where we could make quick changes to the UI without having to install updates physically on the kiosk hardware, which is the more traditional but cumbersome way of doing this.
The issue with this traditionally is that often with in-store kiosks everything comes pre-packaged and is installed directly on the machine. Issues arise when changes to the UI are needed, which no matter how small would need to be reinstalled directly on the hardware, or managed by a device management solution.
Our solution for the MVP was to keep some essential elements installed on the machine, but separate away elements which we might need to change, such as the UI, via a peripheral abstraction layer. This allows us to make quick updates without having to install anything on the hardware, all that’s needed is to push updates to a web application.
Having this peripheral abstraction layer means that the UI doesn’t care how it gets it information. If it was necessary to use a different ID scanner, or facial recognition tool at some point in the future, the separation of the different elements of this tool make it easy to swap out. It allows each separate element of the kiosk to be iterated on separately, and remotely.
The way that we're approaching this check in experience is so that we can quickly iterate on things like the UI, but have things like the ID scanner completely separated. Now we can make changes any time without having to recompile the application and reinstall it on the kiosk.
