Project Natal: Targeted Advertising, a Biometric Nightmare
In recent weeks, we at Eye Tracking Update have centered a lot of our attention on new Apple products, and that doesn’t come as a surprise necessarily when you consider the online buzz after they introduced the iPad earlier this month. News of the new iPhone has been racing around the web for a few weeks now, and whether this lost phone everyone is talking about turns out to be real or not (or the leak accidental or not) it’s certainly tantalizing news that can only help Apple with their already savvy marketing strategy.
But another bit of news that’s perhaps been flying under the radar in comparison comes from Apple’s main competitor, Microsoft.
The camp responsible for Windows recently announced Project Natal, which is apparently planned for release around the holidays later this year. Project Natal is another of Microsoft’s ventures into the gaming world, this time in an effort to compete with Nintendo.
Nintendo already has a pretty solid corner on the casual gaming market – those of us who did not grow up with a controller in our hands, do not own gaming consoles, but still like to pick up a controller and shoot aliens in a virtual world every now and again. The Nintendo Wii’s party-style games manage to bring in people who don’t necessarily play a lot of games, let alone have a gaming system in their homes. That’s the beauty of the party-style game; its seduction is playing with others, which is inherently fun. Nintendo has found a way to get to people who wouldn’t normally blow a few hundred bucks on a console and library of games on their own.
Microsoft’s Project Natal is essentially an effort on the software company’s part to delve into this market, getting rid of those joysticks and buttons and allowing players to interact with the game by physical movement alone. Two small cameras detect a players movements and drive the technology. Kick a ball, drive a car, dance, punch someone’s lights out – Project Natal will interpret the player’s movements and translate that to the onscreen action. The potential for eye tracking, of course, is pretty exciting.
But as with many cool innovations (mind you, this technology itself is nothing new -we’ve seen motion detection in gaming for years now), some see a bit of a creep factor, and what was once Orwellian science fiction seems to step a little closer to reality.
Project Natal’s cameras can apparently determine who is playing the game, including who is in the room watching them play. Think about demographics alone. With cameras in the room, this is huge for advertisers. If a gaming system essentially has cameras that can determine who’s playing and who’s watching, Microsoft then has a window into homes and an eye on their targeted audience, offering what is potentially a treasure trove for advertisers that can utilize Project Natal’s collected information on gender, age, race, etc. In addition, advertisers could theoretically tell exactly how many people see their ads, numbers that often involve a lot of estimation and guesswork.
This is all very exciting and yes, creepy as heck, but it’s certainly something to keep an eye on as news unfolds through the rest of the year.
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- Biometric Devices: A Comparison of Microsoft’s Kinect and Sony’s Move
- Biometric Devices: An In-depth Analysis of Kinect’s Features
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