Not happy with tracking people via RFID and CCTV cameras, a Canadian firm has created the Eyebox, which can track an individual’s gaze as far as ten meters away.  The company hopes to sell it to advertisers so they can calculate how many people stare at their ads and for how long.

With Eyebox, brick-and-mortar advertisers can determine which billboards or products people are looking at in mall corridors or on store shelves, and count them in the same manner that Google counts clicks for online ads.

Xuuk (Kingston, Ont.) claims to have extended the range of the Eyebox to 32 feet and to have eliminated the need for personal calibration. People walking by don’t have to stop in order to be counted.

Because the light is infrared, users are unaware of being observed. Xuuk emphasizes that no data on the identity of the user is collected. Instead, the device simply counts how many people per day have looked at an ad or product. By using a separate Eyebox for each billboard or product on a shelf, advertisers can be charged on a “per-look” basis.

Tracking eye movements is, well, it’s downright creepy, and, although the creator of the Eyebox has ruled out combining the device with retinal scanning, he cannot control what others do with it.

Although Vertegaal ruled out the marriage of the eyebox2 technology with retina scanners or image capturing devices, he conceded the possibility was out there and warned that if customers chose to combine the eyebox2 technology with other image capturing devices, there was little his company could do about it.

“[Already], face recognition software is being used in Europe to track shopping mall theft,” he said. “While we do not encourage such use, and given that our cameras cannot identify people or provide images, it still seems these directions are already being taken by other companies regardless of our hardware.”

All the hyped up paranoia about big brother watching you has now come true.  The Eyebox will know what you are looking at and for how long you have stared at it.  Philip K. Dick was quite the visionary now, wasn’t he?  And after him was Looker, which dealt with this very possibility, in 1981.  Go download it.  You know you’re curious now.

So, now we have holographic images starting to come into their own.  Add an Eyebox, some CCTV, and you have all the makings for Minority Report type advertising.

I would attempt to defeat such measures with sunglasses but this thing can see through them due to the type of infrared scanning.  Therefore, I will support privacy groups before the have been silenced on the matter.  Advertisers may see dollar signs, but I see the continued erosion of my privacy.