Short answer: Angie Westbrook says no: it labels about 26 body parts to turn people into digital stick figures it can distinguish but not identify, tracking movement and gaze rather than just dwell time.
Watch this answer from Episode 21 (starts at 14:51) · Episode 21 notes and transcript
From Episode 21: Not your STANDARD Market, starting at 14:51.
Sam Nadler [14:51]: Super cool. I have two questions, and this may be pretty basic. But how does it actually work? Like Yes, what are the retail locations purchasing? What's the setup? And then I we did discuss previously this really cool metric called the visual engagement score. I would love for you to kinda walk us through what that metric means and how it's driving change for these locations.
Angie Westbrook [15:17]: Yeah. So first, let me just make sure that I say it's all privacy built, privacy first. So we don't use facial recognition. There are some vendors out there that that incorporate that as part of their tech stack. It's always been a pillar of ours to be completely private. And so what we do and what our proprietary algorithms do is we label it's, like, 26 parts on someone's body, and we put together if you see any of our marketing materials, sometimes you have these little stick figures walking around. And that's because that's that's effectively what we see. We turn all of the customer or any human in that space into effectively, a digital stick figure. And what that allows us to do is when you compare those places that we're we're marking, you can distinguish people from one another, but you can't identify who they are. So those you know, those parts that we're labeling, they're not like a fingerprint.
Angie Westbrook [16:14]: You can't identify it out of context. And so we can do lots of really cool things with that because instead of just knowing that a human is in frame, we're actually following how they're moving, where they're gazing, how they're looking. And so the level of confidence that you can have in that data is just a lot more powerful than, just there are some vendors out there or suppliers that will just look at dwell time, for example. And they'll they'll infer that if you stood in front of something, that you must have been engaging with it. For us and Sam, that visual engagement score is really a way to, in a physical store, bring what is like a digital impression on your site, and you think about all of those engagement metrics that you think about.
