In this day and age, life offers everyone a multitude of options. How does a consumer choose? Often times, one spends a considerable amount of time in the choosing part alone. Pizza Hut, one of, if not the biggest name in the pizza industry which entices people with plenty of pizza flavors and selections, attempts to answer this one dilemma of modern era with its innovation dubbed as “the world’s first subconscious menu.”
This Subconscious Menu consists of a tablet computer and an eye-tracking technology powered by a Swedish company called Tobii. Digital images of Pizza Hut’s 20 most common toppings are displayed in the tablet and once the consumer lays his or her eyes on them, the eye-tracker in the form of high-speed cameras and graphics processors analyzes the eye movements. After about 2.5 seconds, it will automatically reveal a generated pizza, suggested based upon which set of ingredients your eyes spend the most amount of time. In just a short time, this technology utilizes 4,896 possible combinations of the toppings where your eyes linger longest and lets the pizza customer know what it senses they want. Upon the approval of the customer involved, orders will be forwarded to the kitchen; or, one can stare at the restart button to redo the process.
While it is interesting that eye-tracking technology is applied in an all too familiar pizza diner setup, this is as well employed as a tool for understanding research fields such as neuroscience, experimental psychology, and computer science.
It was reported that Pizza Hut’s trials and tests conducted on their customers showed a 98% success rate. Though of course, as with all the other technological advancements, there are always challenges on accuracy. For instance, one may look at some toppings longer because the picture on the screen reminds him or her of some familiar objects, or maybe the image used is a bit hard to identify considering its corresponding real life counterpart. In this case, not the actual subconscious craving is captured. But after all is said and done, this innovation is one very promising novelty, and well, if one is not too hungry, why not include extra fun in the typical scan of pizza options?
Photo courtesy of pixabay.com
