Is Google Glass the future of advertising?
Advertising is going to change more in the next 20 years than it has in the last 100. If you need proof of that, just look at the patent Google was granted on Thursday for a Google Glass-based ad system, reports Mashable.
Dubbed ‘pay-per-gaze’, the content would charge advertisers for the number of times someone literally looked at their ad. The concept is buried pages deep in a patent for a “gaze tracking technique, implemented with a head-mounted gaze-tracking device that communicates with a server.”
It would be likely to make money hand over fist, and is clearly the main future-focused impetus for the patent. But it’s far from the only one.
What is this head-mounted gaze-tracking device of which they speak? “Eyeglasses including side-arms that engage ears of the user, a nose bridge that engages a nose of the user, and lenses through which the user views the external scenes, wherein the scene images are captured in real-time,” says the patent. It never uses the word Google Glass — but if someone can explain to me the difference between that device description and Google Glass, I’d love to hear it.
So to recap: the world’s largest search engine was just granted a patent for the most sticky form of advertising possible — ads that literally flash in front of your eyes. Google gets paid when it can ascertain that your pupils pointed in that direction, and for how long. And all of this on the device it is currently seeding among the influencers of the tech community.
In other words, Google Glass is going to bring a whole new meaning to “made you look.”
Read the rest of this article at Mashable.
