‘Subconscious’ Pizza Hut menu knows what you want before you do

By David Nield November 30, 2014

pizza huts new eye tracking technology knows want menu hut — Image used with permission by copyright holder

New technology being developed by Pizza Hut means that you don’t even have to speak your order out loud — the restaurant already knows what toppings you want just by the way you’re looking at the menu. Pizza Hut has worked with tech firm Tobii Technology to produce the system over the last six months, and it’s claimed to offer a 98 percent level of accuracy.

You won’t be able to head down to your local eatery and start scanning right away though, because the tech is still in development; nevertheless, it’s an intriguing glimpse at how the ordering process may one day work in your favorite restaurant, and Pizza Hut is using the label ‘the Subconscious Menu’ for its new gadgetry.

“We wanted to try a few ideas on the traditional menu format,” Pizza Hut Head of Marketing Kathryn Austin told the Telegraph, “and we’re delighted to have developed the world’s first Subconscious Menu, a unique way to reinvent the dining experience.”

There are some clever calculations going on behind the scenes that can help work out what you’re most interested in, even if you’re not sure yourself (hence the ‘Subconscious’ name). The menus are stripped-down, icon-based digital screens that feature 20 of Pizza Hut’s most common toppings — after just 2.5 seconds, the tablet-style gadget is able to pick your favorite topping mix out of nearly five thousand combinations.

You still get the option to view and confirm your choice, so there’s no danger of having something you didn’t want thrust upon you. Pizza Hut has send the technology could eventually be rolled out to restaurants, but there’s no fixed time scale.

Topics

Emerging Tech

Contributor

Dave is a freelance journalist from Manchester in the north-west of England. He's been writing about technology since the…

Computing

This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio

acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.