What's a Xuuk anyways?

Google is in the business of selling eyeballs, so its no surprise that the search giant would one day get interested in a company whose motto is “Sell your stuff..by the eyeball.” It was at Google’s headquarters recently that Ontario-based Xuuk unveiled their latest product, a portable device known as the eyebox2 that monitors eye movement in real time and automatically detects if you are looking at it from up to ten meters. The purpose is mainly commercial, for now, and coincides with a growing trend of plasma screen advertising in stores and public venues. “This camera mimics eye contact perception in humans, allowing us to pinpoint quite accurately what plasma screen or product shelf people are looking at,” said Queens University’s Roel Vertegaal.

Eye-trackers currently on the market are generally ineffective beyond sixty centimeters and require people to remain stationary — meaning you only know they saw your ad if they got close enough to read the fine print, and then stared at it. They were also extremely expensive and beyond the capacity of most businesses to manage. eyebox2 “enables brick-and-mortar stores such as Wal-mart and Sears to use a revenue model similar to Google’s online PageRank and web analytics technologies,” says Vertegaal. But what about privacy concerns? Not to worry. Based on Attentive User Interfaces, the technologies reflect a novel approach to human-computer interactions. The focus of the research is on making everyday devices more attentive to their users by “sensing” when it is appropriate to interact with them. The eyebox2 works more like an automated doorbell than an iris scan; it does not collect or store any images.