As a wafer snaps in your bite, sweet chocolate melts on your tongue, and a hazelnut crunches in your teeth, you spy the Ferrero Rocher box on your friend’s coffee table. With a glance and a flash of thought, your bank account is 18 bucks lighter, and a 48-pack of the nutty chocolate treats are on their way to your house.
You see it; you want it; you buy it — it’s just that simple.
It sounds like science fiction, but it’s not. The technology to seamlessly transform your customers’ purchasing intents into actions is here today, and it will proliferate as augmented reality technology advances. Augmented reality headsets, equipped with eye interaction, link biology with technology, turning thought into action in ways we could only imagine just a few years ago.
Today, the ability to turn the entire world into a shopping mall, where just gazing at your heart’s desire can ring a virtual cash register, is possible thanks to breakthroughs in eye-tracking and eye-interaction technologies.
Technology Catches Up to Desire
Long before the internet brought us one-click buying, digital shopping carts, and free two-day shipping, consumers have harbored a desire to possess what they could see. Attempts to create interactive, two-way cable television systems that would support commerce predated the internet.
Those systems came with a variety of “pointing devices,” allowing consumers to navigate and secure their purchases.
Eye-interaction technology, however, creates a new language, allowing consumers to easily navigate an interface that can now literally turn the world into the user’s store. Old-style eye-tracking translated eye movements into a series of “gaze points,” which researchers could turn into heat maps to gain insight into consumer behavior and package design preferences. This could tell a company what its consumers liked and didn’t like — but in a passive way. Now, with eye interaction, consumers can use their natural visual behavior to actively initiate a transaction when they see something they like.
New eye-interaction technology deepens the eye-brain connection. It bundles eye-tracking with sophisticated algorithms, computer learning, and data filtering to create a new, interactive language that users can master in minutes. It becomes an intuitive, efficient — even sensual — user experience that operates at the speed of thought.
Enhanced Reality’s Logical Next Step
The last season of tech announcements has brought advances in virtual reality technology — Oculus Rift and HTC’s Vive, for example — that give users the ability to experience virtual worlds through clunky and somewhat artificial interfaces such as special headsets, eyewear, and handheld controllers.
Virtual reality stands in contrast to augmented reality, which provides the layering and integration of digital information with a user’s actual environment in real time. Through a heads-up display, a visitor gazing at a painting in an art gallery could view biographical data about the artist, the history of his chosen medium, and a recommended purchase price — as well as the option to buy on the spot via a purchase through eye signals.
Eye-interaction technology creates a new language for interacting in both virtual and augmented reality, complementing natural physiology — without waving their arms or tapping controls on their sleeves. In fact, it takes that interaction to another level, permitting the art aficionado to close the deal even as he takes in the artist’s work. All of this happens without “dwelling” and “winking.” A buyer simply thinks, looks, and via an interaction model with appropriate graphics and confirmation processes, consummates a purchase.
Even more, eye-interaction navigation coupled with activation mechanics will let us customize our purchases, layering other choices into the buying process such as product options, recipients, shipping information, payment methods, quantities, and sizes.
And what of credit card bills? Will consumers and businesses suddenly amass charges for anything that gets a wayward glance? Purchase warnings and apps that temper and focus purchasing will keep us in check.
Additionally, we will secure our purchases with the unique “fingerprint” of our eyes. Using wearable eye-interaction technology employing “continuous biometric identification,” or CBID, the headset continuously captures data from our irises — among the best biometric markers for identification and authentication. This means no more passwords or keys and no risk of loss or theft. Regarding identification and authentication, experts agree that “the eyes have it.”
Shaping the Future for Consumers and Businesses
As this eye-enabled wearable display technology evolves, we can expect it to displace existing systems such as the desktop computer display and the mouse. Eye interaction and eye-purchasing, combined with automatic identification and authentication, will create the next massive transformation in online commerce for both consumers and businesses as transactions become faster, easier, and more secure.
For consumers, this seamless interaction with virtual reality will further disrupt already beleaguered brick-and-mortar retailers, who will need to create virtual incarnations of themselves to compete. In the virtual world, we’ll also see a much broader range of products and services, brought to life with personal, interactive, try-before-you-by virtual experiences. This will create an entirely new industry displacing the existing physical “store merchandising” businesses that simply assure that store shelves are stocked and that point-of-sale demo stations remain operational.
For enterprise transactions, watch for systems that assign individual purchasing rights based on identities (and pseudo-identities) as we enter the brave new space of parallel real and virtual worlds. Watch also for simulations that show manufacturers’ products of services deployed, meeting specific requirements for enterprise customers.
Eye-interaction technology heralds both opportunity and turmoil as cryptocurrencies take hold in virtual environments and we begin to bridge the temporal, conceptual, and physical voids between real and virtual spaces. We can even expect to encounter new forms of government, capitalism, and philanthropy.
Clearly, the eyes do, indeed, have it, as technology evolves to interpret our gaze — and transform our intent into action — propelling the world and our imaginations into an evolved experience.