Roel Vertegaal, CEO of Xuuk Inc. of Kingston, Ontario, has come up with an interesting variation on pay per view. You view a billboard or electronic signage display and the advertiser pays.

Matt Brennesholtz
Insight Media Analyst

Vertegaal, who is also director of the Human Media Laboratory and Assistant Professor in Human-Computer Interaction at Queen’s University in Canada, introduced the system at a presentation to Google in Portland Oregon on May 7th. When asked by Insight Media, Vertegaal declined to add anything about Google’s plans (if any) for the system.

The eyebox2 system consists of an IR light source and a 1.3 Megapixel camera to act as the eye tracker. It is used to determine if a passerby is actually looking at the billboard or digital signage ad - and for how long. This provides great feedback on advertising effectiveness to advertisers - which is why they pay only for eyeballs.

Previous eye trackers had a range of a few feet and needed to be calibrated for the users’ eyes. The eyebox2 system is said to have a range of 10 meters (32 feet) and not need calibration for the viewer’s eyes.

According to Vertegaal, when a person is about 4 meters away, the eyebox2 can track eyes accurate to about 15 degrees. He says this is accurate enough to tell if you are looking at a display, but not good enough to tell what part of the display you are viewing. Xuuk envisions that a camera mounted adjacent to a digital signage display, billboard or just an ordinary shop display could count the number of people who looked at the display and determine how long they looked. Since the system uses invisible infrared light, the viewer typically would not know that his or her eyes were being tracked, and the system can track multiple pairs of eyes simultaneously.

In an advertising application, this would allow the equivalent of the on-line "Pay-per-click" business model used by Google and others. If someone watches your ad, you pay. If no one watches, you don’t.

In addition to "pay-per-view" applications, the system could determine when displays were looked at and for how long to provide feedback to advertisers and display designers. Currently, the system has no way to identify the viewer - a viewer is just a pair of eyeballs. Insight Media doesn’t see why the eye-tracking system couldn’t eventually guide a conventional video or still camera to identify who was actually looking at the display. While there may be "Big Brother" privacy-related issues associated with this extension, this is certainly information advertisers would like to get.

Orders for the system are currently being taken on the Xuuk website, www.xuuk.com, at $999 each, plus $100 shipping. Delivery is to be in 3-4 weeks.