For years, media researchers have been looking into ways to measure people's exposure to ad messages, and with success. But exposure is one thing, and attention is quite another. Is the person exposed to the ad really paying attention? That's a trickier issue.
It's an especially relevant issue for out-of-home advertising, where exposure is far less likely to equate with attention.
So how do you solve the problem of tracking actual attention?
Roel Vertegaal thinks he has the answer, one that's a lot less expensive than existing technologies. It's a sort of camera that can detect when a person is looking directly at it.
Vertegaal, director of the Human Media Laboratory at Canada’s Queen’s University, revealed his device, called eyebox2, at a recent conference at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
The device is basically a small video camera inside a box that’s studded with infrared light-emitting diodes. The infrared light causes a red eye effect among people within 30 feet of the device, but only when they’re looking directly at the camera.
“It looks for red eye, basically, like what you see in flash photography,” Vertegaal tells Media Life. “It only works with real eyes. It finds where they are and figures where they’re looking.”
Vertegaal is promoting his eyebox2 to the outdoor marketplace, to those interested in finding out exactly how many people are actually seeing their ads.
Eyebox2 has its limitations, as Vertegaal admits. It doesn't work particularly well with outdoor billboards, since its range is only 30 feet. It needs to be specially calibrated for the outdoors. It also doesn’t work on moving objects such as mobile billboards.
But Vertegaal says the eyebox is perfect for, say, measuring which in a series of movie posters in a movie theater lobby is grabbing the most attention.
“Before now, eye trackers only worked up to 60 centimeters, and they cost around $25,000,” he says. His company, Xuuk, Inc., sells the eyebox2 for $999.
