Pay Attention translated a familiar media problem into a physical system: what is attention worth when it can be measured directly?
The installation used computer vision to detect audience gaze and convert dwell time into a live monetary value.
Digital media value is often inferred from clicks, impressions, and proxy metrics. Those signals are easy to collect, but they do not always represent attention.
For the Digital Content Next summit, the opportunity was to make the attention economy visible as behavior.
Attention is not just an analytics concept. It is a physical behavior: looking, staying, leaving, returning.
By measuring gaze in the room, the installation turned an abstract business model into a legible interaction system.
Content from member media companies competed across large displays. Cameras detected eye gaze and converted seconds of attention into monetary value using an attendee salary-based model.
I designed the content database, categorization schema, valuation algorithm, and openFrameworks application that queried current content and updated the live display.
The installation intentionally made a reductive metric visible. That was the point: by putting a dollar value on gaze, it created a concrete critique of how media systems value attention.
Pay Attention reframed analytics as a spatial interaction model, connecting computer vision, content systems, and live feedback into a single experience.