Earlier we introduced you an interactive paper billboard that can produce recorded sounds when users touch it. Now, according to the innovators, billboards that know when you’re looking at them can soon become reality if new eye-tracking device called eyebox2 fulfill its promises.
This eyebox2 from xuuk is a palm-sized video camera encircled by infrared light-emitting diodes. It promises to record viewer’s eye contact with 15-degree accuracy at a distance of up to 33 feet and a simple peek from an onlooker scores an impression to offer a tally that allows new Google-like measurement metrics that other advertisers could only dream until now.
According to the CEO xuuk, Roel Vertegaal, who spent several years to develop this smart device in the Human Media Lab of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario:
It will revolutionize the digital-signage industry because it solves the half-missing part of the business model,” explains. Right now they’re pushing ads to clients, and they don’t even know if those clients are seeing those ads.
To make this innovation successful Vertegaal’s team has already surmount some traditional barriers in this eye-tracking gear by leveraging the red-eye effect that irritates many photographers because of the light that is reflected back to the camera from the viewer’s retina and also records a view by deliberately inducing an instance of infrared-eye. For example, when your eyeballs target this gear, the eye reflects light back to the camera which helps camera to identify the reflection and to record the incident that someone has looked at it.
Though, cautious calibration of each viewer is often limited to very short distances in common eye-tracking gears but this latest gear eliminates numerous limitations that common eye-tracking devices normally encompass.
Presently, digital-signage industry have only succeeded to attain tangible viewer metrics and till now, methods of measuring traffic and reach of billboards and plasma displays are only limited on human-conducted site surveys by using notepads and tally-counters or it can be used in retail settings to learn more about shoppers’ viewing habits but now, to overcome these limitations eyebox2 offers an computerized method to locate hot spots of eye activity in the real world and also to analyze the impact of particular advertisement.
Mike Foster, vice president of marketing for MediaTile, a Scotts Valley, California-based provider of digital-signage networks asserted:
This type of technology will have a big influence on how digital-signage media is bought and sold. It’s extremely important for the industry to know who’s seeing the content.
Vertegaal recommends that the ‘first’ use of xuuk’s technology should be only made for the ambient (surrounding area or environment) advertising but he is also looking ahead to introduce this technology on other areas because he wish to use eye activity to produce ‘a mouse for the real world.’
The impending upshot of this new technology can also be applied on other devices like: To prevent cell phones from ringing when you’re in conversation, hearing aids that amplify the person you are looking at and TV sets that will turn off when you’re not viewing them.
It is noteworthy that as compare to other common eye-tracking gear that costs about $25,000 with so many limitations in their working this eyebox2 will cost only $1,000 and with its excellent outputs it will also definitely assist researchers to open new doors for other innovations to take place.
Via: Wired
