If you prefer to order your pizza without going through all the trouble of actually speaking, Pizza Hut has just the thing for you — “the world’s first subconscious menu.” You sit down, glance through the menu, and before you say anything or even make a conscious decision, the menu has figured out which toppings you'd like on your pizza and places your order. Pizza Hut recently began testing the technology in some of its UK restaurants.
This mind-reading menu fuses a tablet computer with an eyetracker. The eyetracker measures your eye movements while you scan through 20 toppings, and decides which of the 4,896 possible combinations you want by measuring the amount of time you spend looking at each one. The tablet lets the diners know what it thinks they want – and waits for conscious approval – before sending the order to the kitchen.
Sounds great for the indecisive pizza lover. But is there anything to this “subconscious menu” besides marketing gimmickry?
The Science of Eyetracking
Eyetracking technology itself is real. Louis Émile Javal first used eyetracking to study reading in the late 19th century, and cognitive psychologists today rely on eyetracking to investigate basic processes like attention, perception, memory, and decision-making.
Modern eyetracking is based on high-speed cameras and graphics processors that measure infrared light reflected from the corneas of the eyes. The processor uses the reflected light to find landmarks like the center of the pupil and the bright patch that gives us the twinkle in our eye. As a person gazes in different directions, the relationships between these landmarks change, and these changes can be used to determine where a person is looking.
