We’ve all seen Minority Report right? The Tom Cruise vehicle of the Phillip K Dick story? The one which inspired Apple to make multi touch, and this guy, and the one where he walks into The Gap and get’s greeted by a personalised hologram advert asking if the trousers are a good fit?
Well, if not, that’s the film above, minus the bit about wooden balls and floating albinos.
Anyway, turns out the Big G (them again!) might be moving us one step closer to this kind of ad scenario with their announcement of a new "eye Box" device, which can be attached to outdoor posters/billboards and used to track the number of eyeballs that look at them. Engadget has the skinny on it, but the basic of the device is it uses infrared to look for "red eye", like you get in photographs, and extrapolates from that the number of peepers reading the ad.
As the post points out, clients love stats on eyeballs and all that kind of stuff – it’s been a major boost for the digital world that we can measure practically anything, something that TV and outdoor have always been behind our lead on – but with this device perhaps Google can help to bring that kind of measurability to the outdoor world?
Well, we wait to see.
However, what’s interesting to me, is that with the growing trend of outdoor digital, something set to explode in the next few years, and this new device, perhaps a link up of the two technologies isn’t too hard to imagine? Posters that interact when someone looks at it? It could happen.
Nokia only the other week were running an interactive outdoor poster that people could interact with, so it’s not something completely alien to the public or clients (admitedly of a certain type).
I guess it recognising your own iris and speaking directly to you is a long way of, but once we’re all carrying RFID chips in our credit cards, or embedded into the backs of our necks, whatever, that series of digital outdoor screens in Charing Cross tube station will start to talk right at you as you ascend the escalator in the morning?
Howard
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