Are You On?
A new offering from AOL kind of creeped me out, and kind of had a wow-factor both. Under the umbrella "Be On," it's a facial tracking system that watches you watching content, and claims to be able to "read" your emotional response.
Remember that movie where Will Smith is walking down the street and ads are being served up to him, personally, on kiosks, based on a retinal scan that's performed as he walks along? What was interesting to me about that wasn't the technology to do it - it was his complete lack of interest in the ads.
My guess is that if technology continues to read our minds about our deepest interests, hopes and fears, and then advertises ever more pin-pointedly to them, we'll tune out ever more effectively. It's already been demonstrated that people simply don't see many of the ads displayed on websites, particularly the ones littered with them.
In this iteration of mind reading, a tech firm called Realeyes has figured out a way to combine your webcam t track not just your eye movement - a trick that information architects have been using for years - but to interpret your emotions as you view opt-in content. The goal is to "improve engagement levels that users have with brands running video content on AOL." So in other words, if people react negatively to an ad, the content owner could tweak it, or ditch it, and try again til they get an positive emotional reaction from viewers.
Of course, for me, there is a leap between a positive response to an ad and buying the product - as Mr. Whipple demonstrated to us all those years ago with his annoying Charmin' squeezing. People found the ad incredibly annoying, but they bought Charmin.' Good product? Memorable ad because it was annoying? I'm not sure, it's been debated in advertising classes for years. And maybe, with today's sophisticated consumer, it wouldn't be as successful, if indeed it did prompt viewers to buy.
Still, the whole notion of tracking people viewing content for emotional response is not new, it's just not been executed using such sophisticated technology before. And as always, the potential for abuse has always occurred to people contemplating this kind of knowledge - if you can tell how a person is reacting emotionally to an event they're witnessing, can you train them to react differently to it?
Or in this case, could someone's camera be activated remotely to watch you watching whatever without your knowledge and consent - along the lines of the infamous flash frames of popcorn and soda in the movie theaters.
Or, like Will Smith, do we just become oblivious to all the noise and concentrate on our own plot?
Remember that movie where Will Smith is walking down the street and ads are being served up to him, personally, on kiosks, based on a retinal scan that's performed as he walks along? What was interesting to me about that wasn't the technology to do it - it was his complete lack of interest in the ads.
My guess is that if technology continues to read our minds about our deepest interests, hopes and fears, and then advertises ever more pin-pointedly to them, we'll tune out ever more effectively. It's already been demonstrated that people simply don't see many of the ads displayed on websites, particularly the ones littered with them.
In this iteration of mind reading, a tech firm called Realeyes has figured out a way to combine your webcam t track not just your eye movement - a trick that information architects have been using for years - but to interpret your emotions as you view opt-in content. The goal is to "improve engagement levels that users have with brands running video content on AOL." So in other words, if people react negatively to an ad, the content owner could tweak it, or ditch it, and try again til they get an positive emotional reaction from viewers.
Of course, for me, there is a leap between a positive response to an ad and buying the product - as Mr. Whipple demonstrated to us all those years ago with his annoying Charmin' squeezing. People found the ad incredibly annoying, but they bought Charmin.' Good product? Memorable ad because it was annoying? I'm not sure, it's been debated in advertising classes for years. And maybe, with today's sophisticated consumer, it wouldn't be as successful, if indeed it did prompt viewers to buy.
Still, the whole notion of tracking people viewing content for emotional response is not new, it's just not been executed using such sophisticated technology before. And as always, the potential for abuse has always occurred to people contemplating this kind of knowledge - if you can tell how a person is reacting emotionally to an event they're witnessing, can you train them to react differently to it?
Or in this case, could someone's camera be activated remotely to watch you watching whatever without your knowledge and consent - along the lines of the infamous flash frames of popcorn and soda in the movie theaters.
Or, like Will Smith, do we just become oblivious to all the noise and concentrate on our own plot?
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