Remember in "Minority Report" when Tom Cruise walks down the hall of advertisements that recognize who you are by scanning your eyes and personalize their messages accordingly?
Well, we're not there yet, but a new patent by Google is a step towards that futuristic technology. Called "pay-per-gaze" advertising, Google's patent for a Gaze Tracking System would monitor what a Google Glass user is looking at and pay advertisers depending on whether he or she actually looked at the advertisement. It could even measure emotional responses via pupil dilation, according to Phys.org.
The patent for the eye tracking system explains that, once you pass the threshold of intrusiveness (like embedding an eye tracker in Google Glass), there are a variety of uses for eye tracking:
"To date, eye tracking systems have mostly been limited to research endeavors because of the intrusiveness, high cost, and reliability of these systems. A technique and system that can provide a reliable, low cost, and unobtrusive, eye tracking system could have a variety of useful everyday applications."
The eye tracking system could of course work with Google Glass heads up display, but the so-called pay per gaze advertising scheme wouldn't be limited to that, according to Google's patent. Very much like the scene in "Minority Report," the success of physical advertisements based outside of the Google Glass display could also be measured using eye tracking:
"Under a pay per gaze advertising scheme, advertisers are charged based upon whether a user actually viewed their advertisement. Pay per gaze advertising need not be limited to on-line advertisements, but rather can be extended to conventional advertisement media including billboards, magazines, newspapers, and other forms of conventional print media. Thus, the gaze tracking system described herein offers a mechanism to track and bill offline advertisements in the manner similar to popular online advertisement schemes."
Google's patent application isn't done just there. The Mountain View giant also suggests that particular advertisements could be measured and analyzed (for a fee) for their emotional impact on viewers, so that advertisers could further home in on your emotional soft spot:
"Additional feature of a pay per gaze advertising scheme may include setting billing thresholds or scaling billing fees dependent upon whether the user looked directly at a given advertisement item, viewed the given advertisement item for one or more specified durations, and/or the inferred emotional state of the user while viewing a particular advertisement. Furthermore, the inferred emotional state information can be provided to an advertiser (perhaps for a premium fee) so that the advertiser can gauge the success of their advertising campaign. For example, if the advertiser desires to generate a shocking advertisement to get noticed or a thought provoking advertisement, then the inferred emotional state information and/or the gazing duration may be valuable metrics to determine the success of the campaign with real-world consumers."
The rest of the patent explains the technical aspects of tracking what people are looking at, but considering that the patent was originally filed in 2011, and we now have all had a look at Google Glass, it's pretty obvious what hardware Google would use to implement the pay per gaze system.
Next up on Google's plate - How about stopping crime before it happens?
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