Not to disparage Stijn's efforts, but he's about a quarter century late to the AR ad-blocking game: when Steve Mann came give a talk at the University of Waterloo whilst I was an undergrad there (circa 1997–2000), one of the applications of his wearable computer that he demonstrated was the ability to recognise and block ads on posters and billboards.
Of course at the time the computing power needed just to do the image tracking was far in excess of what could be carried on his person, so it involved a (possibly pre-WiFi) radio link to a lab network of graphics workstations, and as far as I know the software wasn't doing any kind of AI ad identification, but only matching pre-tagged ad images (or maybe just tracking the physical locations of the user vs the known location of the ads, via GPS + INS + video tracking).
It was nevertheless an exceedingly impressive demo that it has taken quite some time to make a significant improvement on.
I read your comment as praise for Stijn for having made a somewhat practical and working prototype for a concept that could only be demoed in the most resource intensive and clunkiest ways 25 years ago.
Steve Mann's demo was I'm sure impressive, still the idea in itself is absolutely trivial (looking for ways to hide ads started the very day ads were born) and it all comes down to the execution.
"What type of irresponsible uses do you see for this technology, professor?"
"Uh, I think, like, advertising. Like that, that type of thing. One of the things that I'm trying to do is, is design filters to filter out advertising, so that when you're walking around, you could filter out real world spam. You know, already we have spam in the real world such as billboards, and things like that. So, what I envision is that the mediated reality could be used to filter out the spam."
He was my prof in undergrad. He was pretty much half insane; sometimes he would stop talking mid sentence and just stare at the class for a bit. He would do this even on days where he wasn’t wearing the glasses. Such a strange course. Did learn some cool things though.
> One of the things that I'm trying to do is, is design filters to filter out advertising, so that when you're walking around, you could filter out real world spam.
Instead, I totally expect Meta and the Quest X to not block ads, but replace any IRL ads with targeted ads. You will not be able to turn this off. Instead, they could Black Mirror it and highlight each ad found and force you to stare at it for at least 5 seconds so the impression will count. If you don't, it'll just blank out everything else except the ad.
Whenever the tell-all memoir of the next Meta AR ad executive comes out in a few years, I hope they credit your comment for giving them the inspiration of how to implement the Torment Nexus
[Ed.⁰ This is a colloquialism¹; 1 Samuel 13:14,Acts 13:22:
Colloquialisms were the original shibboleths, tbh, but no sexism or other -*isms intended or defended by the aforementioned, admittedly sexist, canonical quotation]
What's the incentive to keep using the headset in your dystopia? if Meta sold the product you're describing, why would anyone buy it? Are you imagining a world with government mandated AR goggles? Why wouldn't I just take them off?
It would be great if some of the anti-Telsa crowd could turn anti-billboard. Some of the billboards are so bright and obnoxious. Electronic billboards in public spaces should be as illegal as shitting on the street.
Never mind billboards. Once people realize they can replace their girlfriend's face with Margot Robbie augmented reality is going to become very popular.
There's now boat billboards that are the same way. Wanna enjoy a nice day at the beach? Too bad, someone parked a boat just offshore blasting a million lumens of alcohol ads straight into your eyeballs
There's a Black Mirror episode where soldiers are fighting against monsters, but one of the monsters stabs a soldier with an electric prod that turns out to be a device to disable the soldiers' brain implants, implants which are there to turn scared refugees into aggressive insect-like monsters, that the soldiers don't hesitate to shoot.
But we've learned the last 1.75 years that we don't actually need such implants, our brains are still very very capable of seeing our fellow humans as cockroaches. Actually even longer than that...
ST:Voyager had a similar episode. The Commander gets captured and subjected to brainwashing to hate a specific group in effort to make him a foot soldier in a war. After being rescued and treated, the Commander still felt immense hatred at sight of the group he was told to hate, even though they helped rescue him. It closed with him making a remark about wishing it were as easy to stop hating as it is to start.
Unfortunately, we are where we are today. “Modern media” (whatever that is) and amplification from social media has allowed hate/outrage evolve from being a sledge hammer (e.g. “USSR is evil!”) into being a scalpel for daily governance and policy setting. Just look at how many people suddenly advocated for jailing (or executing, as I overheard at my kid’s baseball game) a specific former immunologist and presidential advisor. We’re tribal by nature and all too eager to treat the out-group as “less” than we are.
Some states in the US have laws regulating the brightness of billboards and how frequently they are allowed to change the image on them if they're visible from a highway. Of course, that requires someone to enforce the law, and the billboard lobby is one of the most effective at getting their way.
I've traveled to Hawaii (specifically the Big Island) several times and drove H19 countless times between Kailua-Kona and Waikoloa. For about 30 minutes you are driving through old lava fields with a view of the ocean, some goats and the other cars on the road. I've never realized the lack of billboards and I thank those responsible for that. I can imagine that drive inundated with billboards if it was allowed. Trying to sell sunset cruises, sunscreen and your next time share.
I have long predicted that someone will come up with a popular AR/VR filter that selectively replaces people (of a certain look, ethnicity, gender) with something else (modifying them or just removing them), which will put the last nail in the coffin of shared reality
I can understand you thinking it's sad (it is), but I really can't understand not thinking people would want it. Look at camera filters. There's even a "touch up" feature in Zoom. Of course people would want it. Nothing about the way people's revealed preferences would lead me to believe this wouldn't get used by a lot of people.
These features are all on the "sender" side and not on the "receiver" side. I don't imagine many people are running beauty filters on on images received from their girlfriend (but maybe they are?), and I don't see AR being much different to that.
(and a complete face replacement is a few steps beyond a mere "beauty filter")
Does anybody have any interest whatsoever in AR? It seems to be an entirely corporate pushed thing, probably as a means of opening up a new domain of monetization. But in real life, and even on the internet for that matter, I've found practically nobody who has any interest in it whatsoever.
Yeah yeah - 'if I asked people what they wanted, they'd have said faster horses', but if they knew what cars were that quote wouldn't exist. Everybody knows what AR is, a sizable chunk of people have tried it, and nobody seems to want it. If there were some ultra high end AR goggles for $10, I still wouldn't buy them (sans obvious angle shoots like reselling/repurposing the hardware or just pack-ratting it away in a closet).
The reason I mention this is because of this paradox where everybody assumes its success, but nobody has any interest themselves in using it. I think this is because AR is just about literally always a part of sci-fi and so we kind of assume well it must be what the future holds. But it seems like one of those many ideas that sounds way better than it actually turns out to be in real life.
When I'm snowboarding on an overcast day, it can sometimes be hard to see the exact shape & conditions of the snow ahead so I have to slow down to make sure I don't catch an edge on a 'hidden' mogul. I'd like an AR system that used LIDAR/FLIR/etc. to augment my vision to see these features better.
I'm also bad at learning & remembering a lot of people's names at once in social settings, so I'd like a discrete pair of AR glasses that used a local model to add virtual nametags to people in certain situations. (Assuming I controlled the data - I wouldn't like it if this meant data about my acquaintances would be sold behind my back).
So there's at least two potential AR applications I'd be interested in, assuming they could be made to work in a trustworthy & reliable manner for under $1k.
Your argument is that when computers were room sized, nobody would want turn by turn directions.
There are probably uses for AR today that are legitimately useful. I've never used them but I hear good things about the uses in factory floors and classes with technical machinery. But the expectation is always that that the glasses with a ridiculous battery pack (the room sized computer) will become something of a size where every single person will want to have it on them at all times.
Living memory of people alive right now are the room size computers becoming dirt cheap ESP32s.
Okay let's speak of the far distant future. Would I want them if they were contact the size of contact lenses? My opinion is secondary there because there's approximately a 100% chance that they would end up banned. I, like many if not the overwhelming majority, would absolutely refuse to interact with anybody wearing them. And it wouldn't be out of protest of the technology itself, but simply out of privacy issues. What people say face to face should remain between them.
On top of that I have little interest in discussions in real life turning into internet discussions where it's two people searching "proof my view is right [and his is wrong]" and then repeating arguments they oft have little to no understanding of. And there are also practical issues - girls would probably not enjoy the fact that there'd 100% be insta-strip apps. And then there's the dystopia of surveillance and all that stuff. Nah, not gonna happen.
More generally I think smartphones changed the world hard in one direction but, at scale, are starting to change it back in the opposite direction. They enabled great convenience, but it turns out that the nature of 24/7 tech connectivity are also quite unpleasant in many ways. And speaking of things being banned it's already quite obvious that many apps today are already working, intentionally, to function as digital drugs that will, almost certainly, also end up being treated as such in the future.
I think the one and only reason that we're stalling control of these 'digital substances' is because intelligence agencies have tremendous back-door influence and we've created a sort of global honey pot. There's probably still some fantasies of pre-crime and the nonsense belief that if you just control the message you can make people believe whatever you want (really worked well for the USSR, North Korea, and everywhere else that's tried such...). Once we get over the myopia, these things are on their way out.
This reminds me of Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses have been specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble, they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you.
I had forgotten this (even as a former 90s user, decades ago!) — in my head it was known as "AltaVista" — It's how I passed my foreign language requirements =P
Thanks for the reminder, Mr. Dent. Don't forget your towel™
All current AR glasses are fundamentally designed to see the real world with existing light, as opposed to XR (mixed reality) glasses that block out all existing light from reaching your eyes and create a real-time "passthrough" video feed. So AR glasses can't really block any real world ads, can only place an annoying overlay on them. It'd work with XR glasses but no one wants to walk around in the real world with those on.
Maybe someone will invent an electrochromic layer on AR glasses that can selectively block light at individual pixels (rather than darken the whole lens, as current electrochromic layers on some AR glasses do)... that's when RealWorldAdBlock would actually be viable.
Unfortunately there are some real problems with that. Imagine a pair of regular glasses with a small dark rectangle on the lens. Do your eyes see the nice sharp edges of the rectangle? Nope, they just see a dark blob because it's too close to focus on.
In the same way, even pixel perfect darkening has the same problem. You don't see a nice cutout, you see a blurry blob.
Why is a blurry blob that big a deal? In theory a headset could use the focused additive display to draw passthrough video in the blurry regions that should not be darkened to provide a crisp blackout edge at a natural brightness.
I think that would need to be adaptive to the current focus of your eye when not looking at the display since we're talking AR. That's a much, much trickier problem than delivering light of constant focus in a workable AR package, which itself is no walk in the park.
There's a difference between projecting focused light into the optic path and blocking the natural light you're selectively trying to allow through that same path.
If there’s a future vision pro that’s half the weight and bulk… I could easily see people walking around with one. They would be unusually oversized sunglasses by then.
I imagine something that is half They Live and half Shockwave Rider. What if billboards were replaced or supplemented with negative information at the advertiser?
I really wanted to like They Live especially after having watched The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. Similar with The Thing which is also directed by John Carpenter. Both movies start really strong and then just descend into pointless violence. Anyway, I digress ...
That's the point of the movie. Nada got played, and he played himself. It was sound and fury, but it signified something, because it's a movie, not a documentary or fable. Sometimes there's not a sensible ending. Nada didn't get a good guy ending because good guys don't exist the way Nada thought they did.
Nada is not smart. He's a useful idiot. I think that like The Thing, They Live is pretty ideological and subversive, but it's also just a weird campy movie. It's a genre flick, but there's a reason it's a cult classic. Just like Zizek and his guide to cinema, Carpenter knows how to make iconic quotable expressions involving a camera.
> start really strong and then just descend into pointless violence
Dr Steve Mann who eventually led the Google Glass team (along with Dr Thad Starner, who like Mann was also a frequent poster in the MIT wearhard mailing list) did this ages ago with a system he and his students called Eyetap.
Mann is famous for among other things being probably the first person to be roughed up for being borged out.
IRL augmented reality adblock is only required because companies can make our environment worse by eyesores of billboards and other horribly intrusive garbage.
And our respective governments primarily let the companies do this. And since it is a tragedy of the commons situation, governments SHOULD be involved to make sure the primary tragedy isn't invoked...
But the primary tragedy has been invoked (invasive ads everywhere, making our environment and living worse), so we waste massive amounts of money on an overly expensive individualist solution (AR goggles).
> Hyper-Reality presents a provocative and kaleidoscopic new vision of the future, where physical and virtual realities have merged, and the city is saturated in media. If you are interested in supporting the project, sponsoring the next work or would like to find out more, please send a hello to info@km.cx.
The outcome seems more invasive or harsher to the eye than the actual adverts. I think you'd want something that does some kind of generative fill that's low key not noticeable.
The Steve Mann Version from a while ago replaced the ads with useful information, like maps of the local area or your latest messages, shopping list, to do list items etc.
So we are just going to pretend things are not wrong? If this continues, there will come a time when people will have to buy glasses just to look at clean sky because there will be 100s of 1000s of satellites launched into space.
How long are we going to believe in the fantasy world where things just look okay but in reality they aren't
Satellites, I don’t really mind them. They are far enough away that they look like shooting stars or something. Actually, they can look quite nice sometimes. The main risk is that some people might make false wishes upon them, I think.
However if we get orbital advertisements… that would be very annoying.
A few years ago I noticed that my polarized sun glasses happens to block out most public screens. A bit annoying when trying to read the screen about when the next train will arrive (they're prescription, so hard to read without), but nice side effect with the ads on the platform.
When I was working on Microsoft DRM in the early 2000s my thoughts immediately went to a future where AR glasses would block certain things -- but I was thinking of where a building owner wouldn't permit their structure to be visible when you are using AR.
For instance -- I talked to some guys who made awesome super-wide postcards of famous landmarks, but they had been sued by the Louvre for using a photo they had taken of the pyramid, because the structure is copyrighted and cannot be reproduced without licensing.
I've wondered for some time about the privacy impact of AR glasses and how people could opt out in the real world from being captured and analyzed by other's use of AR glasses in a public setting. Similar to how Google StreetView would blur the faces of people it inadvertently captured. In a more extreme example, high school locker rooms and Japanese sentō come to mind. Even the wearer could be vulnerable as they use a restroom throughout their day.
These threads turn into a competition to be the least tolerant of advertising, but I think it's excessive.
Everything about Google and the innovation of surveillance in advertising is horrible.
But when it's non personalized, people forget that their interests can easily be aligned with the advertiser's. It's information. We're adults and can treat it appropriately. It's good to know if X movie is coming out or X pizza place just opened. It doesn't mean we're stupid enough to take the claim about how great the product is literally. We can compartmentalize that part as biased.
I don't go on a first date and get hostile when the girl tries to say something good about herself.
> "it’s exciting to imagine a future where you control the physical content you see."
Yes, it would be, but I am very concerned about a future where others control what I see - e.g. that I'm driven for various reasons to use a non-free OS, which comes with bloatware that injects things into my field of view.
Nice if that was how it turned out. But AR glasses are hardware. And a few companies (say, Apple) have demonstrated that draconian control over the gates to walled-garden hardware can be very profitable.
Nobody will buy glasses that block some of the ads; but I would pay for something that blocks all ads everywhere, including when I'm at a friend's house watching TV or YT and they don't have an ad blocker.
Glasses that block none of the ads have other purposes and are light to wear; I'm guessing ad-blocking glasses would be bulkier and pricier so they would have to have something to show for it.
Also, on the web (on non-Google browsers) uBlock Origin is still undefeated so the adtech folks adaptability is debatable.
This has me thinking about more broadly what kind of real world manipulations AR / XR technology could do. There's a lot of harmful / dystopian ideas that come to mind and curious what kind of research there is on harm protection.
If his execution is right he can set himself up for leading the next tech counter culture. I'm against everyone knowing everything about me to the point they show me everything I want but don't need.
I just realized AR is dead as it always has been outside of work-world and entertainment purposes. Unless we become deeply unsocial, no one is wearing AR gear everywhere they go.
I’d rather we just get rid of them and stop shoving stuff in peoples faces. Thankfully most country have nowhere near the amount of billboards that seem to plague the USA
This is one of the most unhinged replies I have seen here in a while. The guy doesn't even work at Twitter. He seems to work for an IT-consultancy in Belgium.
Of course at the time the computing power needed just to do the image tracking was far in excess of what could be carried on his person, so it involved a (possibly pre-WiFi) radio link to a lab network of graphics workstations, and as far as I know the software wasn't doing any kind of AI ad identification, but only matching pre-tagged ad images (or maybe just tracking the physical locations of the user vs the known location of the ads, via GPS + INS + video tracking).
It was nevertheless an exceedingly impressive demo that it has taken quite some time to make a significant improvement on.