Choosing the ideal gift often feels like an impossible task — even without the added stress of fighting through crowds.
But eBay believes it has found the answer: a concept store featuring isolation tanks and “powered by human emotion” which it says will help shoppers make better decisions.
Volunteers step inside a 'Biometric Booth', enter their email address on a tablet then put on noise-cancelling headphones as lights subtly change colour around them. They will be shown a selection of eBay gift ideas and their “emotional response” to each product will be measured.
A report is then generated from the data, creating a personalised shopping list, and your reactions are projected in a giant, live animation.
The eBay shop has been created based on biometric research, after its survey found Christmas shoppers tend to hit a ‘wall of disenchantment’ after just 31 minutes of browsing.
Founder of Lightwave, which has helped create the ‘emotion booths’, Rana June told the Standard: “Facial recognition or what we call the realm of bio analytics – is very powerful.
“Today we are making a lot of decisions based on what you’re clicking on on a website or how long you’re spending searching for something on your mobile, but soon technology could help to make that decision time shorter. Instead, you can detect how someone is feeling and then help them.
“An example is Netflix – my Netflix queue is quite long and I always don’t know what I want to watch because everything is genre-based.
“But if instead it could be ‘you respond to these kinds of emotional archs, here’s five films that exhibit this’, you can really start to imagine what this technology could be used for.”
Rhian Bartlett of eBay said: “The goal of the space is to remove the stress of the outside world by creating a tranquil shopping experience.”
Watch the video above to see the Biometic Booths being tested out.
The store, at 93 Mortimer Street, is open today and tomorrow.
