When I was younger, shopping always seemed to be a great adventure to me. Call me a rugrat, but between hiding in the racks and playing dress up, I always found entertainment. One of my absolute favorite things to do included posing in store windows amongst the mannequins (Weird right?). Something about the thrill of pretending to be an inanimate object, yet still having the ability to see the faces of people passing by staring and snickering was fun! After I would finish making enough people laugh or just plain confused, I would run off to the next adventure knowing mannequins are just “dummies”, or are they? Kudos to me, I was right, but then again the year was 1994 as technology was still developing. But as we fast forward to the year 2013, a year when all things are possible, even dummies are coming to their senses.
Yep, you read correctly. Mannequins are possibly coming to life in a city near you! Whether you think I’m over exaggerating or not is up to you! Just ask Max Catanese. He’s the CEO of Alemax, an Italian company that produces the IBM Cognos software (the same technology used to track down criminals in airports) to cram into the eyeballs of mannequins storewide. He loving names his creations “Eyesee Mannequins”, having the ability to recognize a shopper’s face, interests in a window display, length of time the shopper lingers, as well as their age, gender, and race. If that weren’t enough, Catanese is currently testing technology that will recognize words. This gives these mannequins (and retailers) the ability to eavesdrop on what the shopper has to say about its attire! This is all in the name of sweet charity, to help five anonymous high end companies in three European countries and the United States. I’d like to believe we are not that nieve.
In a world where its inhabitants are forced to find comfort in discomfort, just where is privacy found? Well searching for it will surely cause you to drop your shopping bags and run for the hills because it is presently a ‘sold out’ concept, especially in retail stores. But if you decide to wait for a rain check, let me remind you of the recent technological invasions to our species. Thanks to RFID (radio frequency identification) tags that are now found in Abercrombie and Fitch, Calvin Klein, and Champion apparel, computer chips accompany you as you walk in your new low rise jeans and tennis shoes. Also, how about those body scanners that are making its appearance, claiming to help shoppers better decide if clothes fit meanwhile blasting harmful radio waves at their skin, causing DNA malfunction? While pondering such breaches in our privacy, quality of life, and health, one must question how much law is left to protect our sanity? Max Catanese assures skeptics that these ‘spy dummies’ come in peace, but do they really? Perhaps not until they become fully animated and slap you for talking bad about their fashion sense. You be the judge because its YOU they’re watching.