From phone calls to online ordering to specialized apps, you have many choices in how you prefer to order a pizza. And now you can add one more to the list with Pizza Hut’s new “subconscious menu,” which uses eye tracking technology to take customers’ orders.
Pizza Hut recently begin testing the new technology in some of its UK restaurants. The menu combines a tablet computer with an eye tracking device that measures customers’ eye movements as they scan through toppings.
Ordering a pizza may seem too simple a task for such ground-breaking technology, but consider this: The menu contains 20 toppings and a number of crust and sauce choices, leaving the customer with 4,896 possible combinations to choose from. An eye tracker could definitely speed that process along, and Pizza Hut’s tablet waits for conscious approval from the customer before sending the order to the kitchen.
Pizza Hut is faced with a couple of complications, however. The relationship between looking time and preference is probabilistic, not 100 percent certain. Also, people tend to look at things longer for a variety of reasons besides preference. Maybe the picture is difficult to identify, or maybe the image sparks an association – either way, one mistake and a customer could end up with anchovies instead of mushrooms!
Regardless of the kinks that may still need smoothing out, this new use of eye tracking technology is certainly innovative. From assisting people with disabilities to providing valuable website research to ordering the perfect pie, eye tracking is a truly amazing technology with multiple uses.
Image credit: “Pizza – 7/1/2005” by Jym Ferrier is licensed with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/