The Wild (and Slightly Terrifying) Future of Inescapable AR Ads

https://beyondthescreen.substack.com/p/the-wild-and-slightly-terrifying

by alexanderbz • 3 years ago

15 58 3 years ago

beyondthescreen.substack.com

throwaway220323• 3 years ago

In what sense would AR ads be inescapable?

I have no plan to ever buy one of these headsets.

If the streets of London became Minority Report-esque e.g. holographic loud projections, I can just move five or ten miles down the road to somewhere slightly less urban. It'd be significantly less expensive too.

I mean, almost all tube station adverts are still just paper billboards, clearly something is preventing them from being screens.

alexanderbz• 3 years ago

If AR glasses become the only device we have (no macs or iPhones), then these ads could be everywhere. Almost like modern tech billboards. Obviously you can just not buy the product, but when everyone else has one it will be hard to do that. Imagine not owning a smartphone right now (a quick example).

2OEH8eoCRo03• 3 years ago

You can count clicks with eye tracking. If you look at it then they know.

rapnie• 3 years ago

Hyper Reality by Keiichi Matsuda:

http://hyper-reality.co/

causi• 3 years ago

Why would adblock be less effective on AR glasses than it is on my phone?

ericbarrett• 3 years ago

I'm skeptical we'll see that any time soon. I interned at a NASA Ames lab that was testing AR, and there seemed to be no way to get depth perception correct on rendered objects directly overlaid on a see-through lens; there was lots of unpredictable variability in perceived depth by subject and background and even time of day. And I don't see us walking around with Geordi LaForge-style visors—simulated AR—any time soon.

_a_a_a_4• 3 years ago

Imagine not owning a smartphone right now

I don't, and life goes on as before

throwaway220323• 3 years ago

The idea that everyone is going to walk around outside constantly using a headset is not a version of reality that I ever think will happen.

There are enough people who like, enjoy breathing normal air and seeing plants.

Maybe if it becomes a brain implant at some point. I hope to be long gone before then.

RajT882• 3 years ago

It'll be basically like smartphones and computers now.

The more savvy users will have a better experience, exerting more control using free (or crowd-funded) tools which block ads. The mainstream companies will continue to make the computing experience an ad-filled privacy nightmare for everyone else.

Also like now is the "Wargames" aspect of it - the computing landscape is already such an ad-filled privacy nightmare that, "The only winning move is not to play".

tiedieconderoga• 3 years ago

Just wait until you can't see a restaurant's menu, in-flight announcements, traffic advisories, etc.

The pandemic opened the door to making a piece of technology a mandatory requirement to participate in society. It used to be possible to live without a smartphone, now you really need to be able to read and produce QR codes¹.

Why couldn't the same thing happen with AR, considering how expensive it is for governments and companies to put displays and audio announcements everywhere?

¹: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/04/my-lif...

cmrdporcupine• 3 years ago

Around here (Ontario) places that insisted on QR code menus seems to be starting to roll it back. Probably under backlash from public (esp older people) who sees it as obnoxious.

Myself I raise a stink every time; I don't like the tracking implications. If businesses insist on it, I try to take my business elsewhere.

throwaway220323• 3 years ago

I haven't scanned a QR code for years and I live in a major city.

I used one QR menu during coronavirus and then started going elsewhere. To be honest restaurants during the pandemic were awful anyway, far more fun to just have friends over for dinner.

I have a fairly varied social life, if anything I probably drink too much. This doesn't match up with reality to me.

Unavoidable means just that - cannot be avoided. To avoid using QR codes doesn't even involve trying.

tomjen3• 3 years ago

You don't actually need a smartphone, which is good because a lot of older people do not have them or can't use them.

I think people sometimes forget that you can inconvinience a waitress without being an asshole about it (they are there to provide service) and that being able to be a customer is important enough that most businesses would prefer staff spend time helping you.

Sure they would prefer you have a smartphone, and it may be less convinient but that doesn't mean they can't work to accomondate you.

hinkley4• 3 years ago

I have no plan to ever buy one of these headsets.

I used to be in a social circle where a couple people claimed they would rather die than ever own an ebook. I wish I had written down which people they were so I could RemindMe in ten years to see if they were enjoying the afterlife or not.

When we are in the early adoption phase there are always late adopters who expect to be never adopters. But peer pressure happens, and some products actually listen to complaints and improve the product to overcome reservations.

And then everything goes to hell in a hand basket.

aprinsen• 3 years ago

Except I never bought cryptocurrency and I don't have TikTok and you being right about eBooks has no bearing on the success or failure of personal AR

shrubble• 3 years ago

From 7 years ago, a funny/spoof video on gig culture, AR etc. https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs

crooked-v3• 3 years ago

As with a lot of these dystopian predictions, I think it falls apart at the complete lack of ad blockers.

svachalek• 3 years ago

About 50-75% of the population doesn't use an ad blocker on the web, I assume that would carry to other platforms as well.

hinkley4• 3 years ago

So I get the Minority Report vibe here, but my great grandmother moved faster than that in a grocery store. Maybe the AI has a little bit of a point in nagging her for being slow.

hoosieree• 3 years ago

Hardcore Henry plus Black Mirror, amazing.

_a_a_a_4• 3 years ago

Totally inescapable except by taking the damn thing off your face.

This 'article' should not be on HN. Is alexanderbz the same Alexander who wrote it I wonder

Edit: I guess it is.

droopyEyelids• 3 years ago

The issue is that a technology becomes required for membership in society.

15 years ago you could reasonably tell someone "if you don't like it, then don't get a cell phone" but today that advice is no longer reasonable for cell phones. If AR ends up being a practical technology, we'll face the same issue in the future.

_a_a_a_4• 3 years ago

See my other comment where I point out that I do not own a smart phone. I do own a cell phone; it gets left at home most of the time.

Let me put it in simple terms: if you don't want to take part in that aspect of society, then don't. The only power which technology has over people is that which people allow.

radq2• 3 years ago

On the plus side, if I can install an ad blocker I should be able to block all ads, physical or otherwise.

EA-31674• 3 years ago

Replace them with the Laughing Man logo, really live the Ghost In The Shell dream.

dbg31415• 3 years ago

Relevant.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g

Apr 27, 1999

hinkley4• 3 years ago

“We can sell up to 80% of a user's visual field without inducing seizures.”

ArekDymalski• 3 years ago

All those dystopian forecasts omit one important thing. Habituation. Humans are quite flexible and we will simply get used to it. AR ads will be as inescapable (and imperceptible) as banners today (both physical and digital alike). And after some time AR will be as immersive and exciting as TV today. Assuming it will take off at all.

EA-31674• 3 years ago

Considering the incredible and rising popularity of ad-blockers and ad-free streaming, clearly decades of "habituation" hasn't diminished the desire to remove ads from our sight.

derekp7• 3 years ago

I'd say it is more about removing intrusive disruption from our site. Ads in magazines or newspapers never bothered me. TV commercial breaks did. Billboards kind of fade into the background, but areas without billboards seem more pleasant.

I recall when baseball first started showing digital ads along the field wall -- at first they specifically made it look like static images, and would only swap out the digital ads during inning breaks (so you couldn't tell at a glance that it wasn't a static physical banner).

smoldesu• 3 years ago

You know what people want more than less advertisement? Free stuff. It's like the old "How much sawdust can I fit in the cookie dough" question - how many ads will people endure before agreeing the end content isn't worth it?

Turns out, a lot. Worse yet, we've been habituated into choosing platforms we don't control and taking corporate interests for granted. Once Apple and Microsoft realized that, it became open season for ad nagging. Constant service pop-ups, advertisements for music streaming, notifications begging you to try a different browser, dishonestly promoted search results and data-collection on app launch have all become the norm. We're fully habituated, with the illusion that we "control" things by paying extra for nicer looking advertisements.

nmcela• 3 years ago

Yeah, no thank you. There's something wrong with the culture if the answer to this worsening ad dystopia is "just deal with it".

RajT882• 3 years ago

Companies must navigate these boundaries carefully.

I LOL'd at bit at this. The following paragraphs do capture the issues neatly, but that sentence just comes off either as inspirational at best or naïve at worst.

JamesLeonis• 3 years ago

Jean Baudrillard would argue we are in an even worse fate: The VR/AR/Mobile/Disneyland world is a presented reality in a way we can dismiss it, while still accepting the world around us as real [0]. The danger is the simple call ("turn it off" or "remove it from your eyes") misses that the reality without the glasses is just as much a fiction. Slavoj Žižek makes the argument as forcefully against Ideology as a concept as well [1].

Thus, everywhere in Disneyland the objective profile of America, down to the morphology of individuals and of the crowd, is drawn. All its values are exalted by the miniature and the comic strip. Embalmed and pacified. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland: digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality.
Certainly.
But this masks something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.
The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp. Whence the debility of this imaginary, its infantile degeneration. This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world [...]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120309115319/https://www9.geor...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVwKjGbz60k

bzwerner• 3 years ago

This article both scares and excites me. Sounds intrusive but will make for some really cool activations. I think Apple Vision will be a hit, especially when they progress from the expensive Pro to a cheaper mass market version.

The Wild (and Slightly Terrifying) Future of Inescapable AR Ads

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