HARD as it is to believe as you struggle to find things, supermarket layouts
are the result of careful planning. And to make sure the design is right, your
every move could soon be tracked by a heat-seeking computer network.
Retailers invest heavily in research that reveals how to design stores to
maximise profits. To do this, researchers furtively follow customers through
shops, writing down everything they do.
But IBM has now developed a computer
system called Footprints that uses a network of infrared detectors to track
shoppers as they move through the store.
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Footprints will not only allow store managers to see how customers respond to
new products, says Howard Sachar, head of the project at IBM鈥檚 Research Center
in New York, it will also allow them to manage their stores better.
The advantage of using infrared images is that they are less 鈥渘oisy鈥� than
normal videos. To work out a shopper鈥檚 path, all the computer needs to do is
track areas of temperature changes. The infrared detectors slightly overlap each
other, making it easy to track blobs of temperature changes from one sensor to
the next.
Because the system doesn鈥檛 use video images, Sachar says the technology also
protects consumers鈥� privacy. 鈥淥ne of the nice things about this technology is
that we are only interested in warm bodies,鈥� he says. But in theory, matching
the times 鈥渂lobs鈥� reach tills with details of debit or credit card transactions
could reveal people鈥檚 identities.