Customers set to check out sci-fi style face-scanning monitors in shops

Face-scanning monitors mounted alongside shop tills and playing adverts specifically tailored to the age and gender of every person standing in the queue?

It sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, but it’s coming to a shop near you.

OptimEyes screens are about to be rolled out in more than 450 Tesco petrol stations across Britain, and the company behind the technology, Alan Sugar’s Amscreen, says it’s in talks with several Irish companies about the screens and the “benefits they can bring to brands in the Republic”.

According to Amscreen’s website, the software is able to identify, measure, and then combine the following characteristics “for a more complete picture of the audience”: Number of possible viewers, number of actual viewers, age, sex, location, and time.

That means it would be able to scan a line of people waiting to pay at a retail outlet and, according to the age and gender demographic of the queue and the time of the day and year, show adverts for products which would be most attractive to those people.

So if a minibus carrying a football team of young men pulled up one morning on the way to a match, the players queuing up to pay for their bottles of energy drinks might end up viewing adverts for the latest lads mag and a store’s breakfast roll offering.

Simon Sugar, son of Alan and Amscreen’s chief executive, told Britain’s Grocer magazine the technology was “like something out of Minority Report” and that it could it change face of retail. He also said the company intended to get its screens into as many supermarkets as possible.

Both Tesco and Amscreen have insisted the machines will not breach people’s privacy as no data or images will be collected or stored and the system does not use eyeball scanners or facial-recognition technology.

While there are no plans at this stage to roll out the screens in Tesco stores here, the technology is being looked at by a number of Irish retailers.