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Pizza Hut Tests New "Subconscious Menu" That Reads Your Mind
HughPickens.com writes Allison Griswold reports at Slate that Pizza Hut wants to help you order your food subconsciously with a new product that is being tested at 300 locations across the UK that uses eye-tracking technology to allow diners to order within seconds using only their eyes. The digital menu shows diners a canvas of 20 toppings and builds their pizza based on which toppings they look at longest. To try again, a diner can glance at a "restart" button. "Finally the indecisive orderer and the prolonged menu peruser can cut time and always get it right," a Pizza Hut spokesperson said in a statement, "so that the focus of dining can be on the most important part — the enjoyment of eating!" According to news release from Tobii Technology, the Subconscious Menu can determine which ingredients your mind and eyes have been looking at longest in exactly 2.5 seconds. The menu then uses a powerful mathematical algorithm to identify, from 4896 possible ingredient combinations, the customer's perfect pizza. "Tests on the Subconscious Menu have been incredibly positive with 98% of people, recommended a pizza with ingredients they love."
Sometimes I'm just reading the menu. Tracking what I look at or how long I'm looking at it isn't representative of my decision making process.
Ah, I think you really need to review the definition of subconcious again.
Point here is even you won't know how dumb the idea really is...until it works.
This would be a great idea if Pizza Hut's main clientele base consisted of stroke victims who are paralyzed everywhere except for their eyes and are able to communicate only through eye movements. Last time I was in Pizza Hut, I didn't see too many such people there. So, I'm not sure what problem this technology is supposed to solve.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
The conclusion is deceptive. They say 98% of people get ingredients they love. But that could be by chance since 98% of people probably like ANY pizza that does not contain anchovies.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Yeah, well you also decided to hire someone to cut off your penis, so don't mind me if I discount your decision-making abilities and opinions.
If you've only ever lived in cities known for their pizza, Pizza Hut seems like cheap junk. If you've ever lived in one of the many many places where people don't even know what good pizza tastes like, you'll learn to appreciate Pizza Hut for being, at least, edible.
I don't mind pizza hut. Pizza is pizza,
Says someone who must never have eaten actual good pizza. Pizza Hut's pizza is really nothing like, say, the pizza I've eaten from a pizzeria in Naples where the pizzas are thin-crust, baked in an oven that's about 1000 degrees F for maybe a minute or so. But hey, that's probably too high of a standard. Pizza Hut's pizza is nowhere near the top of my list of "decent" pizzerias in the U.S., either.
and if you have kids and they get to eat cheaply/free, all the better
That's nice and all, but I can also make my own crust in about 5 minutes, let is sit overnight in the fridge, take it out and toss it the next day, top it with whatever toppings I want -- with whatever quantities I want, choosing whatever quality toppings I want to buy -- and throw it into my oven on the hunk of pre-heated steel that best simulates a Neapolitan experience in a home oven.
And for investing maybe 15-20 minutes of my time (less than the time it would take me to drive to and from Pizza Hut), I get a pizza that's astoundingly better than Pizza Hut, for maybe 1/4 of the cost. Even if I have a kid or two who eats free, I still probably get it for less than 1/2 of the cost with higher quality ingredients, AND I get to choose exactly what ingredients I'm feeding my kid.
Sadly, in the UK they've been closing loads of Pizza Huts
Ah... you're from the UK. That explains a lot. "Hell is where the police are German, the lovers Swiss, the mechanics French, the chefs British, and it is all organized by the Italians."
In all seriousness, though, it's a really useful skill to learn to make pizza at home. It doesn't take a lot of time, it's cheap, and it can really taste a LOT better (than Pizza Hut, anyway).
(P.S. Sorry about the British joke -- there's a lot to say for English food. Fish-and-chips, Yorkshire pudding, and nothing like a good ole "fry-up" for breakfast. Mmmm... black pudding....)