COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) - A Clemson University project that tracks shoppers' eyes as they browse the aisles of a simulated grocery store will be featured this month at a packaging and processing trade show in Las Vegas as a way to determine what draws customers to buy a product.
The exhibit uses digital technology to track what participants look at and find persuasive as they walk through the mock store named C U Shop.
It's an innovative research tool that uses the technology of new eye-tracking glasses to show the impact of packaging, said Maria Ferrante, vice president of education and workforce development for Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute.
"It really shows that packaging is truly important and really affects our daily lives. When we go into a retail store and make decisions, packaging is often the reason," she said. "This is one way consumer goods companies can test packaging and its effectiveness."
The Virginia-based institute is helping pay the way for nine students from the South Carolina university to showcase their project at PACK Expo in Las Vegas Sept. 26-28. More than 25,000 people are expected to attend the event billed as the largest processing and packaging industry trade show in North America.
Ferrante said she and others toured Clemson's packaging science department while in Greenville last year for the association's annual meeting, and began talking to school officials last spring about bringing C U Shop to the expo.
New eye-tracking glasses that allow the wearer to move freely helped make the project possible. A small camera bounces off the lens and takes pictures of the wearer's eyes 30 times a second to collect data, without requiring the person to face forward wearing cumbersome equipment as previous technology did. Afterward, the data is dumped in a computer to map what the eye focused on, said Chip Tonkin, director of Clemson's packaging design and graphics institute.
He said similar research has been done on virtual shopping, but those results can be unreliable. People react differently when looking at a computerized image than they do in a store surrounded by shelves of actual products.
The project was launched late last year when the school put together a team of 10 packaging science and graphic design students, who earned elective course credit for their work. Completed in June, Clemson's 1,000-square-foot C U Shop lab includes packed shelves, a produce area, signs, baskets for shoppers to pick up and even a sliding-glass-door entrance - as well as hidden cameras and one-way-glass on a side wall.
"We had to create an environment that's as realistic as possible," Tonkin said. "As you walk in, it no longer feels like a sterile lab. It feels like a little store."
Students are in the process of tearing much of that apart to ship to Las Vegas.
The project was funded by Clemson benefactor Harris Smith, the namesake of the school's packaging science and graphic communications building. He provided $150,000 to build the lab, buy the eye-tracking equipment and fund graduate student costs for the next two years, Tonkin said.
Last semester, students concentrated on making the shopping experience itself as realistic as possible. For example, when students were told it was too quiet, background music was added, said Joanna Fischer, one of two graduate students overseeing the project last semester.
"It allowed me to see how consumers look at packages," she said, adding she hopes to test individual products in the future.
Comments made during experimental runs highlighted the difficulty of introducing a new product to consumers, as "shoppers" explained they picked up a product because that's what they normally buy, said Fischer, who's earning her master's degree in packaging science and hopes to work in product branding.
The 24-year-old Anderson native is among the students heading to Las Vegas.
There, the students will encourage people attending the trade show to go through the exhibit. Participants will receive a personalized report detailing their experience. After the show, students will release two reports summarizing their findings - one analyzing the appeal of private-label versus name-brand packaging, and the other on the impact of sustainability messaging.
Brand names don't determine shoppers' decisions as much as they used to, making packaging increasingly important. The goal is that companies use the eye-tracking research method throughout a product's creation, to eliminate designs that don't draw attention, Tonkin said.
"A significant number of products fail every year," he said. "They never had a chance because their packaging never caught consumers' attention."