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Headline: “GazeHawk bring Eye-Tracking Technology to the iPad“.

First reaction: Eye-tracking? That’s scary.
Second reaction: I didn’t even know eye-tracking existed on any format, let alone iPad.

Yes, who’d’ve thought it: tracking web surfers’ eye movements via webcam. There’s more to that small round circle above my MacBook’s screen than meets the eye (pun intended). There I was thinking it was solely the reserve of producing warped photos of my face with massive forehead and pointy jaw when first activating iPhoto… and the occasional Skype call. Oh how I was wrong.

It ALSO allows web publishers to see which adverts I have seen, have paid slight attention to, or indeed spent a reasonable time pondering… but decided not to click on.

This is, of course, an innovative tool for measuring readers’ response to any part of a webpage or app, most notably its adverts, supplementing the standard measurement results of click-through rate and media impressions. It helps to validate, or redirect, advertising spend based on far more intelligent data. A far better measure of ROI.

Whilst I initially feared GazeHawk was yet another sign of our world turning all 1984 meets Minority Report, I was somewhat relieved to read that the program requires users to opt-in. Not only that, but it requires the user to calibrate their eye movements. Of course it does, how could it possibly just KNOW what you’re looking at, without you knowing it knows.

So whilst eye-tracking is a clever and useful tool for advertisers and brands to get on-track with their ROI, it begs the question: does it really having a chance of kicking off? What’s the consumer incentive to activate and calibrate? It’s all very one-sided.

What WOULD be clever – and worth opting-in for – is an automatic increase in the type of adverts that you have paid particular attention to, similar to the way that Amazon or iGoogle ‘remember’ your likes. You just have to be careful not to look at that Viagra advert by accident.

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