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Long Range Eye Tracking for Advertisers
holy_calamity writes "A Canadian firm has launched a device that can track the gaze of multiple people from up to 10 metres away. Originally developed at Queen's University, Ontario, they hope to sell it to advertisers to allow them to monitor how many people look at their ads. Admittedly they are trying more benign stuff too like better hearing aids, but I doubt that will make up for movie posters that make a song and dance whenever you glance their way."
we'll just be living in it.
If I were them, I'd make it so they moved more when you looked away - causing you to look back.
In all seriousness though, this technology is a little creepy. Not only that, but tracking eye movement has to have better applications than simply refining the process of ad targeting.
Marketing is one of the most obnoxious influences in modern history, perhaps only lawyers and religion are as destructive.
There are people like engineers, programmers, farmers, teachers, machinists, etc, who do productive work. These people *create* goods and services. They *generate* stuff that people enjoy, the result of their work is more than the input.
What marketing does to their customer is, if everything goes well, to increase market share, which means another corporation loses an equivalent market share. Marketing generates nothing. The result of marketing is always less than the input.
That's before you hook it up to a face recognition system. The correct time to legislate is before foreseeable abuses happen, not after.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD