[dgallagher]

I walked through Target's Open House in SF a few weeks ago; I'd recommend visiting if you're in the area. It's pretty slick product display space. Each "room" has a projector which gives an overview of four or five products in a room, and how they tie together in your life. One of the rooms had a Kinect mounted above next to the projector; not sure what it was being used for.

The main lobby has a couple long tables with all of the products on display which were demo'd in the rooms along with some interactive Surface-like table which detects if you get near it and moves floating sprites around. They had displays on the wall listing the most popular products, and a few sales people to answer questions. IIRC there were approx 40-50 products displayed. Kudos to Target for setting the space up.

Everything being sold felt they'd fit perfectly inside of a Brookstone, or Sharper Image when they still had retail stores. Most of them were "vitamin" products rather than "aspirin", which gives way to some of Allison Arieff's criticism in the article: "What the products on display have in common is that they don’t solve problems people actually have."

That's very fair to say. There were a few items which did solve real problems, like Nest which can help reduce heating costs, but most things sold didn't fit into that category. Many were "neat" things which you could entice someone with disposable income to splurge on.