MoviePass co-founder Stacey Spikes has announced a new cinema-related venture that will use facial recognition to ensure adverts are being watched in exchange for free tickets.
The new app, PreShow, will require each person’s phone to have facial recognition turned on to track how much attention is being paid to each ad.
Movie-goers that want to obtain their free ticket will be required to sit through 15-20 minutes of advertisements.
If a person tries to walk away or if their face becomes obscured, the ad will pause after five seconds, according to CNET.
“If it weren’t for facial recognition, I don’t think we could still do it,” PreShow’s founder and chief executive, Spikes, said in an interview with CNET. “If not, they could game this all day long.
“We had two problems to solve: We didn’t want people creating dummy accounts, and we’re dealing with real currency at the end of the day, so we needed to uniquely lock it,” Spikes, who co-founded MoviePass in 2011 but departed when Helios and Matheson Analytics acquired it, said. “Facial recognition at the phone level is just a year and a half old. You couldn’t do this company two years ago.”
Spikes has launched a Kickstarter for PreShow that has already surpassed its initial goal of $10,000. The service will initially be invite-only.
Image: pxhere
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