Peugeot: Blink detection for measuring drivers’ blinking frequency

On average, a person blinks about eight times per minute. Race drivers, on the other hand, are trained to blink as little as possible. Because at an average speed of 300 km/h, a simple blink corresponds to dozens of meters traveled blindly.

How long do you think you could go without blinking? That’s what DDB agency and Peugeot set out to measure.

DDB and Peugeot – all eyes on track

DDB Brussels is a full-service advertising agency from Belgium, known for its creative and innovative solutions, as well as for its long-standing experience with brands such as VW, IKEA, bpost bank, DKV, and others. They joined forces with Peugeot, a renowned French automobile company, to mark the return of Peugeot to the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC).

Creating an app that detects blinking 

Peugeot, with its dazzling Peugeot 9X8 hybrid racing car, aimed to make this comeback to the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) at the TotalEnergies 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps race. So, DDB Brussels, being at the forefront of groundbreaking campaigns, aimed to develop a contest that would enable participants to experience the thrill of being a professional race driver.

And one of the distinct and vital characteristics of professional race drivers is that they are able to blink as little as possible.

So, to create an unparalleled experience for participants, DDB Brussels faced the challenge of developing an application that could detect even the slightest blink with utmost precision. The objective was to test participants’ ability to remain focused on the circuit for as long as possible without blinking while behind the wheel of the Peugeot 9X8.

The success of this challenge relied on finding cutting-edge technology capable of accurately capturing the subtlest blinking motions in real time. And FaceTrack immediately stood out as a top solution.

In the blink of an eye with FaceTrack

Visage Technologies, a leading provider of facial tracking technology, presented the perfect solution for DDB Brussels’ challenge. Leveraging our advanced FaceTrack technology, DDB Brussels was able to incorporate precise blink detection into the application.

The accuracy and precision of the blink detection were crucial to maintaining the integrity and fairness of the contest. By leveraging the capabilities of FaceTrack, DDB Brussels and Peugeot Belux were able to offer participants an authentic experience, simulating the demands faced by professional race drivers.

One of FaceTrack’s key strengths is its speed and lightweight nature, allowing seamless integration into both small mobile apps and complex solutions. With low data size and memory usage, FaceTrack ensures market-leading speed and accuracy.

Moreover, it can run smoothly on mobile, web, and desktop platforms, and its robustness shines through challenging conditions, such as faces with high variability in scale, illumination, pose, and occlusion. This ensures exceptional performance and reliability, crucial for demanding applications like the blink detection app developed for Peugeot.

In addition, integrating FaceTrack into projects is hassle-free, thanks to detailed guides, samples, and an easy-to-use API. With quick integration, developers can access tracking data on the fly, streamlining the development process. FaceTrack is also highly customizable, allowing users to adapt its speed, performance, and other parameters to their specific use cases and hardware capacity.

Ultimately, all of this allowed for seamless integration into the application developed by DDB Brussels, ensuring that blink detection operated smoothly and efficiently.

Through the collaboration between Visage Technologies and DDB Brussels, Peugeot Belux successfully launched a captivating, exciting, and immersive contest that allowed participants to step into the shoes of professional race drivers.

“We’ve worked with Visage Technologies once before and were very happy with the collaboration. And for this project, we were specifically looking for a technology that could capture the blinking very precisely, so we knew we had to contact Visage Technologies again. It was very important to us that the software was reliable because we expected to have a lot of users on the website at the same time, and FaceTrack proved to be highly reliable.”

– Laura Paulus, Digital Producer, DDB Brussels