Billboards have learned to track the view of a person from afar

The world's first camera has been created that can track the direction of a person’s gaze from a distance of up to ten meters. Until now, the range of such devices did not exceed a meter, and they usually install on a personal computer. Here the scope is quite different.

First of all, the new technology is useful in outdoor advertising. Advertisers will analyze which parts of billboards attract the most attention from users. Moreover, it will be possible to instantly move the banner exactly to the place where the person turned his gaze.

Of course, smart billboards are not the only scope of the new Eyebox2 camera, but the most profitable. Advertising corporations are ready to invest billions of dollars just to make advertising more intrusive and effective.

However, so far the accuracy of the technology is small: the angle of view is determined within a radius of 15 °. According to the developers, now they can say only one thing with a high degree of accuracy: a person is looking at a billboard or not looking. However, this is already enough to start making billboards of a new type. If they pick up when a person has looked at them, they will be able to show additional information or include animation.
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The system uses a grid of LEDs and a 1.3 megapixel digital camera. This is a higher resolution than that used in other similar systems, so a digital camera can easily catch infrared highlights from human pupils at a distance of up to ten meters. The system can track multiple people at the same time.

Scientists who designed the Eyebox2 camera have already established a commercial firm, Xuuk, to bring the device to market.

In the future, billboards will be able to adapt to human views. Advertising space will be sold depending on the attractiveness for the eyes. Probably, such systems will also be installed along the shelves of supermarkets. Perhaps they will be embedded in televisions and displays of computers. Speech recognition systems will be able to use narrowly focused microphones to shield themselves from excessive noise and even in a crowd to discern the voice of an individual from several meters away. In general, the scope of application of such devices is truly enormous, especially in our time, when human attention becomes the most valuable and expensive resource.

via New Scientist