Pay-Per-Gaze! Advertising models in the future may be based on a 'Gaze Tracking System' that monitors eye movements to pin down what the user is looking at and charge advertisers accordingly. The move from 'clicks' to pupil dilations may come after technology giant Google's patent for a Gaze Tracking System became public last week. Pay-per-click is an internet advertising model currently used to direct traffic to websites, in which advertisers pay the publisher ( typically a website owner ) when the ad is clicked.
Originally filed in May 2011, the patent presents an idea for wearers of a head mounted device ( and in 2013 observers are guessing this may be Google Glass ) to have gaze tracked so that the system can pin down exactly what the user is looking at and even the emotional responses via pupil dilation, phys.org reported.
Information about where the user was gazing when viewing the external scene would be sent over to the server.
An image recognition algorithm would be excited on the scene images to identify items within the external scene viewed by the user. A gazing log tracking the identified items viewed by the user would be generated.
"To date eye tracking systems have mostly been limited to research endeavours because of the intrusiveness, high cost, and reliability of these systems," according to the patent.
Google plans to set up an advertising model of pay-per-gaze. "Under a pay-per-gaze scheme, advertisers are charged based upon whether a user actually viewed their advertisement," the patent explained.
