Pricing Tobii’s New Eye Tracking Glasses

The Swedish eye tracking technology enterprise Tobii has released a new set of mobile eyeglasses that can track a user’s eye movements while they’re on the go. It looks like it’s being marketed to companies interested in tracking their customers shopping habits and eye movements at retail stores. Procter and Gamble are beta testing the glasses and apparently planning to research product packaging and shelf placement. Ipsos Marketing, a firm that specializes in market research, is also in on the new device.

According to an article on the website Internet Retailer, the glasses come in at a hefty $45,000 per pair as part of a package that includes related testing equipment, a data collection device, and Tobii Studio software for analyzing the data collected with the glasses.

Barbara Barclay, general manager for Tobii North America has said that they have received several inquiries from retailers all interested in using Tobii’s glasses in order to test mobile content on smart phones. Barclay, however, said she wasn’t free to name them.

Ipsos Marketing global president Gill Atchison says, however, that the glasses have shown promise as a research tool and that the company is thrilled to have had access to early versions of the device. “Ipsos looks forward to the time and cost savings this will bring our research organization,” said Atchison. “Never before has it been possible to cost-effectively conduct quantitative studies in real world environments and automatically see the visual attention a product or display received.”

It’s an expensive price to pay, but for those in the marketing and branding industries, data about certain products and how consumers shop can be priceless. The glasses are said to use a video camera mounted in the eyeglass frame to record what a consumer looks at as they walk around a store, or as they view a handheld smart phone. Infrared light and an eye tracking sensor are mounted to one side of the frame, and are used to illuminate and track one eye, recording its movement and hopefully offering insight into what the shopper is interested in.
The consumer wears the glasses and carries a small data-gathering device, which is wired to the glasses, collecting data for later analytics. Retailers can view a visual record of what a person saw in a store display or on a screen, and the system, like Tobii’s past endeavors, provides a heat map illustration of the person’s eye movements, highlighting the areas more frequently looked at. As to whether or not this information is truly representative of what the consumer is thinking – well that’s another question altogether (see our past articles focusing on this debate in the eye tracking world).

Still, for retailers to have data on what a consumer is seeing as they wander around a store is pretty remarkable and incredibly valuable. Now the challenge is how to interpret that data and what to do with it.

Tobii Glasses: A new way to test mobile sites

Related articles:

1. Tobii Announces a Faster, Better Eye Tracker
2. Tobii’s Wearable Eye Tracker: Revolutionary or Marketing Hype?
3. Tobii Launches Tobii insight, Now Competing With Customers?
4. Tobii Helps Make UX Research More User Friendly
5. Blog Your Life With Sony’s Eye Tracking Prototype
6. SMI Announces New Eye Tracking Glasses 2.0
7. Microsoft patents eye tracking augmented reality glasses