IRL AdBlock for augmented reality is being tested: shield yourself from corporate programming
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I don’t know about you, but sometimes I can’t stand the amount of advertisements I’m constantly bombarded with, but whilst there are solutions to this when browsing the web in the form of AdBlock software, what about in real life? Software engineer Stijn Spanhove is developing a technology that can let you block IRL ads just like you would those haters, through the magic of Augmented Reality eyewear!
Specifically, this is an application for Snap Spectacles that can identify real-world advertisements in the form of billboards, bus stop ads, newspaper ads, and more, and block them out with a big red warning sign. The app is built using APIs and libraries specific to Snap via its GitHub, so it is limited to the platform at the moment, but we can definitely see the same sort of thing being developed for other AR platforms down the line.
The project is still early on in the production stage, but the hope is that when it’s fully developed, you’ll be able to replace this image with something you’d much rather see; a bucolic countryside scene perhaps, or even something more… exciting (this is the internet after all, you know where it inevitably ends up). You can see Mr. Spanhove take the tech for a spin in the video below via his X/Twitter account.
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Other commenters have already drawn comparisons to John Carpenter’s classic film, They Live, with its themes of resistance to corporate mind control via glasses. Whether or not the glasses will also reveal aliens disguised as humans living among us remains to be seen.
Snap Spectacles and the current AR glasses market
Despite the big fanfare around big AR projects like the Apple Vision Pro and the Meta Quest, enthusiasm for augmented reality seems to have waned a bit for the moment. Both Microsoft (with the HoloLens) and Meta (with the Quest 4) have put their newer projects in this field either on hold or cancelled. As a result, this means that Snapchat is potentially in a good place to take over some of the market with their Snap Spectacles 5, which have generally received respectable reviews.
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