147
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
147 points (100.0% liked)
World News
22057 readers
146 users here now
Breaking news from around the world.
News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.
Guidelines for submissions:
- Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
- Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
- Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
- Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
- Social media should be a source of last resort.
These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.
For US News, see the US News community.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Exactly. Vending machines have never needed complex ways of detecting when a customer is ready to buy something, because there's really no need for anything beyond having a button available for customers to communicate to the machine "I'd like to buy something". What it sounds like to me is they're using the facial recognition technology to track the demographics of who buys what and how often. Do men like X snack more than Y? Do women buy more in the morning or afternoon? Stuff like that.
Devil's advocate: they don't need to track demographics, but a "bonus feature" would be to start playing some ad when they detect someone looking at the machine. Not a random leaf or shadow, so it doesn't start playing annoying ads at random in the background, but an actual face. Or do play a random ad in the background when nobody has looked at the machine in a while.
Of course the temptation of using demographic data to target the ads, could be too big to resist for the company. The temptation of also storing statistical data, might follow.
Well, they did specify that the facial recognition software was there to activate the purchasing interface, rather than to advertise the machine's contents, so I'm not inclined to cut them some slack if the real motivation was to show adverts to people when they're claiming it needs to recognise faces because otherwise no one can purchase anything. (Why can't the purchase interface be activated all the time, rather than requiring sight of a face? Do they think someone other than human beings is going to try to buy something? Is there a widespread problem with squirrels and pigeons buying from vending machines, which requires machines to know when it's a person trying to buy something?)
I was thinking more of in a dark pattern way.
Let's say, the marketing dept decides that having people go through a funnel like "Attraction, Presentation, Call to action", will increase sales of whichever product has the higher profit margins.
In a "dumb" vending machine, they have a single advertisement where they have to put all those steps in, be it as static graphic elements, or as a looping video. A client comes by, sees whatever part of the video is playing, makes up their mind, and decides to interact with the machine or not. There is no control over whether they saw the "Attraction" part first, or directly the "Call to action", which might as well have put them off, and that's a lost sale.
Now imagine they made a "smart" vending machine, where they could guarantee that the "Attraction" part will play when, and only when, someone looks at the machine. Instead of having random people pass by and look at senseless stuff, now they have someone that's showing interest in the machine, and it springs into action by playing the full funnel... right at the moment the user is making up their mind!
Honestly, I'm surprised they don't do it more often, like in supermarkets and stuff: you go through an aisle, and wherever you look, ads would start playing just for the thing you're looking at, offering you an alternative (higher profit) product, maybe flashing a "Limited 3x2 offer, JUST FOR YOU" if you stop showing interest, and stuff like that.