Virgin Mobile is using your webcam to track your eye movement on its YouTube channel, changing the ad whenever you blink.
This is how it works: Once you give Virgin permission to fire up your webcam, it goes through a quick calibration process of finding your eyes and asking you to blink on two separate instances. It takes less than a minute. Virgin has created a series of 25 different clips, and every time you blink it skips from one clip to the next.
I’m not quite sure what purpose Blinkwashing could serve in a practical setting, since it is nearly impossible not to blink, especially when you’re trying not to. I just spent the last 10 minutes in varied states of teariness, blinking a lot at first just to see if it worked, then trying to keep my eyes open for as long as possible to see if I could make it through an entire clip. It turns out that I couldn’t, but I like the potential of hands-free control using just a standard webcam.
