Engineer creates ad block for the real world with augmented reality glasses
54 comments
·June 22, 2025cpcallen
dusanh
Came into this thread looking for a mention of Steve Mann! Man was ahead of his time. More on his 'Visual Filter' and more here http://www.wearcam.org/ieeecomputer/r2025.htm
bee_rider
If the processing was too much to the on device before, then Stijn might be just on time, rather than late.
null
aspenmayer
Awesome that you got to meet him, I remember reading about EyeTap on Slashdot around that time and thought he was onto something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann_(inventor)
Steve Mann explains the EyeTap (2010)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiFtmrpuwNY
43 Years of Wearable Computing and AR | Steve Mann | AR in Action (2017)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI9obFrfZ4Q
From 1996: Meet the man who invented a wearable computer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCco6FMCRmk
DEF CON 7 - Steve Mann: The Inventor of the So Called Wearable Computer (1999)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVquUd-MFtU
At around 5:05 in this video, someone is asking:
"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 already 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."
VladVladikoff
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.
brikym
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.
jrvarela56
I lived in Sao Paulo when billboards were banned (2010). It was amazing.
danielbln
Billboards in the US are wild to me. The craziest, flashiest shit, straight into your eyeballs while you're trying to focus on the road.
jrvarela56
It’s a great example of how ‘the market’ sucks at externalities. We just accepted that you can pay to spam people’s visual field.
navane
Can't look at your phone, but look at this!
Mountain_Skies
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.
spqr0a1
Beyond regulating brightness, 4 US states ban billboards entirely. (Hawaii, Alaska, Vermont, & Maine)
CoastalCoder
I wonder if that's related to them having nature / vista tourism as a major source of revenue.
ceejayoz
There was a Black Mirror episode along these lines, where people could block you from seeing them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(Black_Mirror)...
nashashmi
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.
politelemon
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.
_Algernon_
Desaturating and removing movement would go a long way. That's what make them eye-catching.
bee_rider
It is sort of funny that he’s using Google’s AI to do it. Sorta like “I used the ad company product to block the ads.”
CoastalCoder
Or even more horrifying. Pay $X / month to avoid us unblocking these ads.
Or even worse, ads are just green screens, and Google will run auctions on why get filled in on your VR glasses based on AdChoices.
bee_rider
Hopefully if AR glasses become a big thing we’ll get conventional Linux window manager for them, and not have to deal with Android or Apple stuff.
PaulHoule
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?
raffael_de
https://i.redd.it/ak5ejwle2li01.jpg
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 ...
aspenmayer
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
So it goes.
Artists tell the truth by first telling a lie.
quaintdev
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
bee_rider
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.
EvanAnderson
People will want the AR glasses to blot out the physical ads. AR glasses are expensive and ad tech is changing constantly. We "sell" the glasses and offer ad blocking service for a monthly fee.
Imagine how many people we could get to "buy" our AR glasses if we subsidized the price by displaying our own ads!
We could enhance our revenue by offering a second pricing tier that displayed fewer ads.
/s
justmarc
Said ads should be replaced with useful, educational content
williamdclt
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
unangst
Wearable ad-blockers should mask ads with AI generated, scene correct dynamic autofill.
xnx
This is a fun demo implementation of a common idea.
Why isn't this a real thing for Android that would block out ads across all apps (e.g with overlay permissions)?
honeybadger1
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.
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.