Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

That gives associates a better shot at selling the customer exactly what she wants. And it creates an opportunity for a little stealth CRM data collection, because the system could also capture information on all the virtual items that customers bring in. If the customer is showing an item from a competitor’s online store, it’s easy enough to scrape that bit of product ID. Being able to identify what products customers go to other retailers for—especially when customers go elsewhere first—could be especially useful competitive information.

And even if no detailed product data is available, just being able to mix your store’s inventory on a shared screen with the customer’s own shopping list is still likely to deliver results that make the customer happier.

None of that is in Apple’s patent application, of course. It spends its verbiage deep in technical minutiae (“For example, camera may detect a gesture that corresponds to an image sharing command to move an image from the current projected display to another projected display. The image processing software may interpret the gesture viewed by camera to identify the image sharing command. Processor may then retrieve and transmit data corresponding to the image to an electronic device for the other projected display to allow the other electronic device to display the image on its projected display”).

And there’s no guarantee that Apple will ever actually build tiny projectors into its phones and tablets, and then provide the software to make all this work. True, adding pico projectors seems like a reasonable next step to go along with the now-ubiquitous camera in every phone. Then again, Apple seems to have a hard time just building a near-field communication chip into an iPhone. Go figure.

On the other hand, why wait for Apple? Comparing items from different retailers on a single screen is something customers are already doing anyway—that’s just E-Commerce with multiple browser windows open. It’s how your customers already shop. And they already bring images of what they want, and even your competitors’ Web sites, into your store on their phones. They figured out merged-channel shopping years ago.

If you can just identify how to support that in-store—with something more than an “everything you want is on our kiosks” approach—your associates will have just a little better chance to give customers what they want, and keep them coming back into the store.