A revolutionary cloud technology could allow shoppers to plan where they park in real-time by ‘seeing’ a virtual image of parking spaces on their phone, potentially reserve spaces and even receive updates when their space is expiring.

The technology could be a game-changer for shopping centres, giving shoppers the ability to drive seamlessly into shopping centre car parks into a vacant spot without having to look around for a park.

The cloud technology, unveiled at the Amazon Web Services Summit this week, could also be used to update users on the time limit of parking spots.

The cloud service, which integrates with parking sensor and camera technology, can be used at shopping centres or on busy local streets to allow users to virtually ‘see’ the availability of parks ahead of time.

The smart parking technology being showcased at the AWS Summit in Sydney this week.Simon Elisha, Head of Solution Architecture, ANZ Public Sector, Amazon Web Services, told Retailbiz that the “sky is the limit” when it comes to potential uses of the technology.

“You can imagine from a citizen’s perspective I could drive toa  local shopping centre, look at an app on my phone and see whether there’s spare parks or whether I should avoid that location because it’s full,” he said.

The software allows drivers to see a virtual representation showing vacant spaces.

The technology links up sensors and cameras in car parks and streets, like that which currently exists at shopping centres across Australia, with a software which shows a virtual representation to users on any device.