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You know those really annoying ads that you just ignore? Well, Google has patented a Gaze Tracking System that aims to discover which ones you aren’t looking at and why.
The technology will analyse your feelings after viewing an ad to see which are most effective.
It will work with both online and offline advertisements – such as billboards, magazine and newspaper ads – and could work with a head-mounted device (most likely Google Glass).
Phys.org reports that the eye-tracking system will know what the user is looking at and track their emotional responses via pupil dilation. It’s described as "pay-per-gaze" advertising and could charge businesses for each proper view of their advert.
This is reminiscent of Google’s pay-per-click advertising, which charges businesses each time a user clicks on one of their paid-for ads. Perhaps pay-per-gaze would offer advertisers a more robust system that could better track the effectiveness of an advert.
The patent reads: "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."
To protect user privacy, Google states that "personal identifying data may be removed from the data and provided to the advertisers as anonymous analytics."
Could this be the future of advertising?
