Electronics giant Fujitsu is set to reveal technology that analyses the purchasing behaviour of shoppers in retail stores by detecting their lines of sight, according to a news report.
Japanese technology news site Tech-On! reports that the technology brings up a visual display that shows what products visitors pay attention to on store shelves.
The technology is still under development but will be revealed at the company’s Fujitsu Forum 2014 this week.
The implementation of infrared range sensors have been set up in several locations in the selling space too for a real world example, where visitors will be detected based on data that have been collected by individual sensors, and their movements will then be tracked. Just what can such data be used for?
The shopper’s line of sight is detected using an infrared (IR) LED device and IR sensor. Infrared light is directed at shoppers; the light reflected from their corneas and the positions of their pupils are detected with the IR sensor.
For example, when the shopper’s pupil is positioned nearer to the outer corner of the eye than the light reflected from the cornea, it means that the person is looking in that direction.
Fujitsu claims that this kind of technology would come in handy to “detect the movements of an unspecified large number of people with a margin of error of several tens of centimeters.”
Only data of the coordinates of visual lines is stored; other data such as image data does not remain, says Fujitsu. Each line-of-sight sensor can detect the line of site of one person.
