If iPhone 8 rumors are true, and it will have a 3D face sensor, than one possible outcome could be advertisements that follow your gaze across the screen. That’s according to Mike Rundle, a software designer who wrote a piece today on Medium titled ‘iPhone AR Selfie Revolution’. Eye-tracking ads like those in Minority Report could be a reality.
Selfie Revolution
Of course, there’s no guarantee this will happen. We’ll have to wait until next week before we know if the iPhone 8 will even have a face sensor. Ads already track us around the web, and if eye-tracking ads are possible, someone will probably try it. Going from web tracking to eye tracking is a slippery slope to be sure, and we haven’t seen this in the wild so far, given that Apple isn’t the first to implement this technology.
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Mike’s piece examines the rumors and Apple acquisitions and simply asks what is possible. Other, more benign possibilities include:
- Biometric and health information from a user’s face.
- Fully immersive selfie AR effects, with fidelity and graphic detail more similar to CGI effects in movies.
- Facial movements and emotion recognition that alter the software you’re currently using. If you look sad, the app could recognize that and change or adapt functionality.
Aside from ARKit, another API that Apple released to developers this summer is a Vision API which can “identify faces, detect features, and classify scenes in images and video.” Someone also found code in an iOS 11 beta that suggests your iPhone will know when you’re looking at it and suppress notification sounds.
Ads are fine, scaning my eyes isn’t.
Are any ads opt-anything?
As long as we have the option of turning it off and if it is optin and not optout.