UK firm pioneering new facial recognition advertisements

If you’ve ever seen the 2002 science fiction film Minority Report with Tom Cruise, you may remember a scene when Cruise's character John Anderton walks into a mall and passes a holographic advert for a car. A camera near the ad identifies him by scanning his retina, calls him by name and offers a test run in the new Lexus. Anderton then passes an ad for Guinness, which suggests that he could really do with a cool beer. Personalized and interactive ads have long been the dream of firms trying to sell their wares to exactly the right kind of consumers. Although we don’t have eye-scanning in public spaces yet, high-quality webcams are combining with new digital facial analysis techniques being developed in the UK, to help firms sell us exactly what we never knew we needed.

Report: Robin Powell, London