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Pizza Hut Tests New "Subconscious Menu" That Reads Your Mind

Posted by samzenpus on from the pizza-you-want-before-you-want-it dept.

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."

3 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Dumb idea by kuzb · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
    1. Re:Dumb idea by frovingslosh · · Score: 3, Interesting

      And I'm sure that couldn't possibly be a scam to try to get people to order a few slivers of onion or green pepper at an extra cost of $1.50 each (while taking away some of the pepperoni at the same time).

      --
      I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
  2. Time tracking is a *bad* metric by tlambert · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Time tracking is a *bad* metric.

    As someone who is trying to choose my last topping on an N-topping pizza deal, I will spend my absolutely most time trying to choose between the last two toppings, unsure of which one of the two I want more. That will push those two toppings way up on the list, inflating their supposed value to me, when in fact, they are chosen last precisely because they have less value than anything else to me.

    This seems like a way to sell extra toppings for an up-charge.