An experimental real world adblock

http://jonathandub.in/cognizance/

by tstactplsignore • 12 years ago

290 141 12 years ago

jonathandub.in

nsgi2• 12 years ago

This reminds me of the Black Mirror episode White Christmas (only blocking ads instead of people).

dubin• 12 years ago

Hey, I'm from the team that worked on this at PennApps. This episode was actually our inspiration for the device!

nogridbag• 12 years ago

Another Black Mirror fan here. I was about to post the same thing as the parent. It's awesome that the show inspired this, but it's also quite scary at the same time!

bound008• 12 years ago

Hey! I was a mentor at PennApps and I came by on your table early friday night and loved the idea. I was the one who suggested shipping your own .deb packages for opencv with all of the good stuff built in. You should publish that if you decided to do that... would love to hear from you guys... great work!!!! pennapps@boun.cr

qntm• 12 years ago

Are you aware that "this reminds me of Black Mirror" is a really, really bad thing? Like, did you miss the whole point of the show?

bvm• 12 years ago

I especially enjoy the fact that I dismissed it at the time as being "too unrealistic", one month later a prototype turns up on HN!

TeMPOraL7• 12 years ago

I learned to err on the side of "doable" in case of science fiction technology. With our current tech level, we can already do pretty much almost anything; usually economics is the only blocker.

bhhaskin• 12 years ago

It would be pretty cool if you could replace advertisements altogether. Imagine driving down the road instead of billboards you see art work.

derekjobst2• 12 years ago

That is such a great idea.

zzkt• 12 years ago

something like The Artvertiser perhaps? http://theartvertiser.com/

bduerst• 12 years ago

Billboards are expensive. Who would pay to put art up there? Artists?

Then you're back at artists advertising their work.

VLM• 12 years ago

Imagine driving down the road instead of billboards you see art work.

How you made it 28 minutes before someone suggested pr0n is a mystery to me.

TeMPOraL7• 12 years ago

It's been done already. Someone hacked a street billboard in Russia once to play pornography.

mrtron• 12 years ago

And replace brand logos with accurate descriptions.

Instead of blurring the label, translate Coca Cola -> Cola Soda Pop (355ml/300 cals)

spiritplumber• 12 years ago

Or "OBEY", "MARRY AND REPRODUCE", and so on.

chriskelley• 12 years ago

In São Paulo they have the "clean city law"[1] which banned outdoor advertising in 2006. Pretty crazy, here's a flickr gallery: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tonydemarco/sets/7215760007550...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

ToastyMallows2• 12 years ago

This is crazy, these pictures look like they're from a dystopian future. Can you imagine if this happened in the U.S.?

Alupis4• 12 years ago

Is a company's name on their building really considered advertising? I mean, if I owned a nice building for my company, I'd take pride in having our name on the front.

kansface• 12 years ago

This also made the city incredibly hard for me to navigate about a decade ago (no smart phone).

grecy• 12 years ago

New Zealand has a similar law - you can't advertise on a building unless you own it and use it.. i.e. Coke can put a coke sign on their own building, but nowhere else.

It's beautiful.

beagle90• 12 years ago

Seeing a city like that was so refreshing, it must be nice to live somewhere your attention isn't constantly pulled here and there, and where a sense of want is re-enforced every time you lift your head.

anigbrowl• 12 years ago

Or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18qD9hmU9xg

This is an excerpt from Slavoj zizek's Pervert's Guide to Ideology, which in turn excerpts the cult sci-fi film They Live. Both are very much worth your time.

josu• 12 years ago

Or Pepsi replacing Coca-Cola ads with their own.

nsgi2• 12 years ago

There's a Firefox extension that does that for websites.

http://add-art.org/

tarr11• 12 years ago

Replace "ads" with "things I don't agree with" and you have quite the filter bubble.

derekjobst2• 12 years ago

People already do this online. Facebook is very good at making sure you only see what you agree with.

unknownian• 12 years ago

I think that was GP's point, but true nonetheless.

lotharbot• 12 years ago

Facebook is good at making sure you see whatever you've previously chosen to engage with, whether or not that engagement was "agreement". If you like to argue, FB will give you lots of disagreeable stuff from the sort of disagreeable people you like to argue with.

dragonwriter2• 12 years ago

Facebook is very good at making sure you only see what you agree with.

For organic content, their algorithms (before considering paid reach) are organized around making sure you only see, approximately, what you've actively indicated you want to see (which isn't the same thing as "agree with" -- if you positively engage with things you disagree with, you'll see more of them.)

Of course, Facebook's revenue model is entirely based on people paying -- either via ads-in-the-overt-sense or paid reach for posts -- for more favorable treatment for their content than the relying on the normal algorithms and (in the case of ads-in-the-overt-sense) even the basic opt-in following mechanism would provide, so its not at all the case that it is good at making sure you only see what you agree (or have positively asserted an interest in seeing, even.)

Though they do let you opt out of ads from a particular advertiser or particular ads, so they are arguably fairly good at making sure you do not see what you have actively requested not to see, which is different than only seeing what you agree with (or even want to see.)

rasz_pl• 12 years ago

I would rather see systems that try to guess/let me input directly what I dont want to see.

I soo wish for "NEVER EVER SHOW ME THINGS LIKE THIS AGAIN" YouTube button. Currently I open one wrong YT link and for the next week google keeps recommending me videos of shitting babies or some 'hot new singer you just need to listen'.

zach_daily• 12 years ago

Advertisers will adapt to this if it becomes ubiquitous. Logos will be replaced with color schemes, etc.

Also this tool could be terrifyingly hackable. Imagine someone hacking into your vision.

Animats• 12 years ago

Cute. But blurring the labels of everything you pick up is not helpful. They need something like Word Lens, set to recognize ads and replace them with "Ad", or something more attractive.

peterb• 12 years ago

I would love it if they could optimize it for specific use cases, such as removing the advertising on the ice & boards from a televised hockey game.

flohofwoe• 12 years ago

Awesome! This needs a Google-Maps like database for billboards which everyone can contribute to, look at a billboard to detect its borders, coordinates are uploaded and downloaded by others in the same area.

jimktrains2• 12 years ago

We could probably start laying the ground work by adding billboards to openstreetmaps

ArekDymalski• 12 years ago

I'm waiting for someone to hack it and replace the blur with "OBEY" ;)

Amorymeltzer• 12 years ago

FNORD

spain3• 12 years ago

That's pretty cool but I feel like they're mixing up ads and brands. Like I expected a real life adblock to say, blur actual advertisements in a magazine or billboard. Instead in this video they show it blurring brands like on the soda bottle (which isn't that useful). I'm sure the tech could probably do it but the demo could be better.

ReedR95• 12 years ago

I'm one of the members of the team that built this.

Some context about the project: We built this a few days ago at the PennApps hackathon during a period of 48 hours. We originally wanted to try to block out magazine advertisements and billboards, but didn't think we could quite get that working with the time constraints, so we chose to block out logos instead. We called the project Brand Killer.

spain3• 12 years ago

We called the project Brand Killer.

Ah neat, that certainly is a lot more fitting of a description.

apt-bunt3• 12 years ago

Do you also block out images of Nicki Minaj? ...because apparently she is also a "brand."

pbhjpbhj4• 12 years ago

Surely a logo - like on a coffee cup - is an advert for a brand?

spain3• 12 years ago

You're right. That was actually a bad example, I admit. A better example would be the bottle of soda that you might see on a store shelf.

I've updated the reply.

hawleyal• 12 years ago

I'm not sure I agree. A visible logo/brand being itself an advertisement maybe a side-effect of the logo/brand being prominitantly displayed, but I would argue that it is more identification than advertising.

The difference becomes apparent when considering soda pop bottle versus a high-end dress shirt. The soda-pop bottle is a trivial purchase, and is generally available among many other brands offering the same thing. However, the shirt may be purchased with more effort and care, and is generally available among other clothing from the same brand.

The brand on the bottle offers identification of the individual item during purchase and later during selection for drinking. No matter if it is found in a bin among bottles from other brands, or within a section containing only bottles from one brand. Bottles are also discarded after use, so they are not identified individually, but merely as one of many copies. I have several bottles of soda pop, some Coke some Pepsi. The brand is still very relevant.

A shirt on the other hand is probably accompanied by an entire section of clothing for the same brand, and does not need individual identification. Even more so during selection for use, shirts are generally owned by a single person and cared for individually. I only have one pink broadcloth shirt, and it happens to be from Banana Republic. The brand is not as relevant.

No?

Fuxy• 12 years ago

I'm more amused of the idea of going shopping with this thing.

If you didn't know the shape of the bottle or other characteristics you wouldn't know what the hell you're buying.

Sounds like a fun shopping trip.

nfoz2• 12 years ago

If we have a society don't like ads (perhaps a subcategory: intrusive ads, offensive ads, loud/bright/aggressive ads, extremely large ads that clutter our cityscape), we could simply ban those categories with law. Honestly I would prefer that. I find the intensity of advertisement to be offensive to my ability to live, my freedom of thought without people spamming images at my face all the time.

pavel_lishin• 12 years ago

I find the intensity of advertisement to be offensive to my ability to live

Other people find Muslims, Jews, Mormons, non-caucasians, breast-feeding mothers, alcohol-imbibers, blondes, Ugg boots, motorcycles, gold watches, crying children, airplanes passing overhead, and dogs to be offensive to their ability to live. Can't ban everything you don't like.

Also, there are already restrictions on advertisements (when was the last time you saw an cigarette ad on television?), and some places are much more restrictive than others.

nfoz2• 12 years ago

I wasn't suggesting to ban any of those things, so I don't see how that's relevant aside from careless strawmanning. If a large majority of a society wants to ban something, it can, and often that's a reasonable thing to do -- cigarette ads are a good example.

I simply suggested that, when we're considering hacking our eyes as depicted in the OP to avoid ads, we might consider limiting the ads instead. And that has nothing to do with racism.

minthd• 12 years ago

The free speech laws in the u.s. are pretty crazy. There was a case of a few pharma salesman who recommended psychiatric meds to doctors for off-label use(not proven by strong experimentation). This is illegal today,as defined by the FDA.They probably hurt many people. In the court they claimed "freedom of speech" and won(it's now going to the supreme court).

In that context, it's hard to see ads blocked by law,even though there's a high likelihood they are harmful to people, and especially to teens and kids.

meatcar• 12 years ago

I had the pleasure of taking a course taught by Steve Mann, credited as the inventor of visual computing. I recall he mentioned creating a similar device. Not sure if it ever actually happened, but here's a link that I was able to dig up:

http://wearcam.org/diminished_reality.htm via http://cyborganthropology.com/Diminished_Reality

c22• 12 years ago

When everyone's wearing this I'm gonna dress up as Ronald McDonald and walk invisibly through the crowds.

Someone1234• 12 years ago

On a related note: I've been thinking about making a t-shirt with the EURion constellation[0] on it, just to see if I can break some CCTV camera software (which could be using software image parsing libraries which check for it) or mess with people's digital photos ("This software does not allow the unauthorised copying of bank notes")...

Could be fun, but might do nothing at all.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

tomrod• 12 years ago

Sounds lovely. How many angles would be needed for total vision blockage?

542458• 12 years ago

That's a really cool idea, but I don't think it would work.

From wikipedia: "Research shows that the EURion constellation is used for color photocopiers and is likely not used for computer software."

You can see this with photoshop, where the presence of the constellation does not appear to affect currency detection.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/projects/currency/

Anthony-G3• 12 years ago

I knew there was some sort of preventative measures built into modern colour photocopiers but hadn't heard of the Eurion constellation until now. It turns out that it was actually discovered by the author of the excellent UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux [1] resource.

[1] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

Mizza• 12 years ago

There is a part of the most recent episode of Black Mirror which deals with this (sort of, at least), totally worth checking out if this is an idea that interests you.

EDIT: In a comment below, the team mentioned this was their inspiration. Life imitate art imitates life. Cool!

JoshTriplett• 12 years ago

John Wright's "The Golden Age" uses exactly that plot point early on: someone vanishing by wrapping themselves in a passing advertisement.

jkaunisv1• 12 years ago

Also used in a William Gibson novel where a certain t-shirt is worn to hide the wearer from CCTV.

estebank• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughing_Man_%28Ghost_in_the_Sh... d:D

Paul-ish• 12 years ago

This could well for people who record a lot of video and don't want to remove the brands manually.

spb• 12 years ago

I knew I'd seen something like this before - the "NO AD" app that replaces advertisements with art: http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/this-augmented-reali...

hokkos• 12 years ago

Now, that would be something useful for the Hololens.

ingenter• 12 years ago

I've been thinking about this for a very short period of time, but then it got to me that I would not want to use it because ad-recognizing algorithm is not perfect, and I could miss a road sign or other important information because of such augmented vision.

I still find the amount of advertising annoyingly high, literally every plane that could be possibly filled with ads is filled with ads. This has to change on another level, not by simply ignoring the advertisement in one way or another.

apt-bunt3• 12 years ago

The reason why this is totally different from adblock is that this draws attention to what is fuzzed out, rather than just ignoring it completely as with adblock/hosts files... so when you see something fuzzed out, you are like "woah is that lucky charms or what?" (based on the fuzzed colors). With adblock/hosts you see nothing so you have nothing to focus your attention upon.

Don't get me wrong this sounds like a fun project though.

lotsofmangos• 12 years ago

Presumably you could do a sunglasses version with a couple of greyscale lcds and tiny cameras, that just blacks stuff out. Would also then be nice to get it to shade the sun as well. Oh and they should go completely black in response to danger, but that goes without saying.

stolio• 12 years ago

Under "More Info" it says it's built with: Hardware.

Maybe it's a secret, but is it custom hardware? Could a Raspberry Pi handle this kind of image processing?

TeMPOraL7• 12 years ago

While I'd totally love to have a real-world adblock, I fear a wide-scale deployment will only make things worse.

See, such ad-block device to be effective needs to be able to distinguish ads from legitimately important communication like traffic signs or warning labels. This in turn will make advertisers design their ads to be as indistinguishable from content as possible. In the end, we'll win nothing in terms of ad reduction, but we'll lose traffic signs and other important information.

I sometimes wonder if we shouldn't have stopped fighting ads a while ago just to keep them from improving. Fighting advertsers is like fighting a fast-mutating bacteria. Whatever partial solution we apply makes it only evolve to a more nasty and disgusting form to be fought next season. I worry that the end result will not be lack of ads - it will be lack of information you can trust.

superjambo• 12 years ago

Eh we should just kill it with regulation. Emotive advertising is simply a market distortion similar to monopolies or cartels.

It's a double cost to society too since not only are peoples buying decisions warped but the people creating adverts are doing negative work instead of producing more useful goods / services.

cLeEOGPw3• 12 years ago

By your logic we should stop fighting diseases, i.e. killing bacteria, to prevent bacteria from evolving.

TeMPOraL7• 12 years ago

That does not follow by proper application of logic.

But to clarify:

- advertising isn't as harmful (yet) as infectious diseases

- if we want to get rid of it, the same rules apply as to fighting bacteria - you want to hit as hard as possible in as many places as possible, to not give any room for bacteria to mutate; proliferation of adblocks is like taking antibiotics and stopping treatment half-way - not effective enough to kill off everything, and forces bacteria to mutate into drug-resistant variety

Then there's also problem that ads mutate much faster than bacteria - because they're driven not by evolution, but by sentient adversaries.

barbs• 12 years ago

Along the same lines of porting things to the real world: this DRM chair.

http://vimeo.com/60475086

teddyh• 12 years ago

See also SeatSale: License to Sit: http://wearcam.org/seatsale/

johnloeber• 12 years ago

VR, Augmented Reality, Holograms, etc. are currently abuzz in the news. It's probable that these headsets will become popular consumer devices within the near future. And they present a conflicting opportunity for advertisers and consumers:

1. Advertisers will probably want to use AR devices to superimpose their product logos on the real world, thereby advertising more at a lower cost. No need to rent billboard space when you can beam your corporate logo right into the eye of the consumer.

2. Consumers will probably want to use AR devices to remove product logos from the real world, much in the spirit of AdBlock and this video (using machine vision to detect advertisements, and then to replace them with something less objectionable).

What effects will these opportunities have? Who will come out on top? Will it be like advertising on the internet, all over again?

chii2• 12 years ago

Advertisers will probably want to use AR devices to superimpose their product logos on the real world, thereby advertising more at a lower cost. No need to rent billboard space when you can beam your corporate logo right into the eye of the consumer.

if advertisers did this, they have to somehow pay out to the consumer something of worth - free stuff. otherwise, i m not gonna let an advertiser beam anything into my field of view!

runeks• 12 years ago

if advertisers did this, they have to somehow pay out to the consumer something of worth - free stuff. otherwise, i m not gonna let an advertiser beam anything into my field of view!

Exactly. If the price is right, people will view advertisements. It's really as simple as that. So the question of whether advertisement will win or disappear depends on whether advertisers will be willing to pay what consumers demand in return for viewing the ad in question.

How the economics of this will change is very hard to predict, IMO.

cLeEOGPw3• 12 years ago

AR app that helps you change a tire and at the same time shows ads on the tires.

Terr_2• 12 years ago

I think a far more powerful (and proactive) approach is to allow the underlying brands/advertising through, and then augment them with negative associations.

It's a bit of an obsolete example these days, but think back and consider cigarette advertising, and someone trying to quit. If you just blocked them out, marketers would evolve new ways to reach you, right? But if their logos and ads were always surrounded by a picture-border of pulsing blackened lung-samples... Well, you're actually reprogramming your own mind to dislike their brand, which is very different.

A tamer example would be to enhance your recognition of "good" brands at the expense of the bad/less-good ones. Imagine walking through a supermarket and having your eye drawn to the "good" products at the expense of the "bad" ones. (Where Good/Bad is determined by some criteria that are resistant to subconscious advertising.)

chii2• 12 years ago

Where Good/Bad is determined by some criteria that are resistant to subconscious advertising.

so what are those criteria, and more importantly, how much bribery would advertisers/companies pay to make themselves on the good list?

Negative advertising is just as bad as positive advertising in the scenario you proposed.

Terr_2• 12 years ago

<shrug> Sure, there are always reputation problems (whose opinion do you listen to?) but the additional level of abstraction is still beneficial, since it helps defend from people trying to condition your monkey-hindbrain using stuff you can't normally control.

The most important difference is it helps increase your ability to control your own unthinking behavior through other conscious choices. (This is generally agreed to be a worthwhile thing, and factors prominently in a lot of religious and psychological traditions.)

waylandsmithers• 12 years ago

I've been interested for a while in taking adblock in the opposite direction in terms of technology: a service that unsubscribes you from those annoying catalogs that always come in the mail. I feel like I'm just the middleman between the postal service and the dump.

dnr• 12 years ago

https://www.paperkarma.com/

click170• 12 years ago

Why do I have to subscribe to a service to not receive spam?

The fact that the service exists is evidence of the problem.

Canada's anti spam law just went into effect for email, companies can't (see arent supposed to) just email you out of the blue anymore, why can't this apply to snail mail as well?

I think the answer is because the postal service survives on the revenue they get from stuffing your mail box with garbage, but I assert that's not a good enough reason. If they can't keep themselves afloat without the spam. I question whether they need to exist at all in the age of free webmail accounts and the ability to run your own server.

wiml• 12 years ago

https://www.catalogchoice.org/ ?

erickhill• 12 years ago

Is that can your kid is drinking from a soda, or paint thinner? I love this idea as a concept, but there are some "brands" you really want to be able to see.

Sir_Substance2• 12 years ago

If you can't tell by the shape of the can, you should probably go to hospital, you might be having a mini-stroke.

13• 12 years ago

I have a bottle of floor cleaner that comes in the exaxt sake bottles that orange juice does.

elihu• 12 years ago

I think there's an interesting opportunity here to replace logos rather than simply blur them. For example, you could replace the logo with:

- the name of the brand in plain text

- the parent company of the brand

- the parent company's stock symbol, market cap, and percentage change in the last week

- political campaigns the parent company has contributed to recently

- consumer reports / better business bureau ratings for the brand / company

MattGrommes• 12 years ago

Back in the 90s there was an artist who did a project I've always liked where she blocked all ads in streetscape pictures with orange. It was to show just how much of our landscape was covered with ads. I'd love to see this project adapted to do the same.

Houshalter• 12 years ago

Can we build this into a browser? Instead of trying to modify the html to remove ads, just blur them out after it's rendered?

vortico• 12 years ago

I like this idea, and it's entirely possible with the CSS `filter: blur(10px)`.

brightsize2• 12 years ago

I hope that this tech can be scaled up. Every time I see the ad for the Off-world Colonies I get more tempted to pack it in and go. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZNzz4SaTYk . The device would have to see through smoke/mist in this case, and I could imagine that being a challenge. And then there's the audio...

vacri3• 12 years ago

The solution to this problem isn't technical, it's legislative. Legislate limitations on ads - several places do this, and they have a 'quieter' public experience. This solution requires electronics and power, and still doesn't change the amount of visual space taken by ads.

It's a nifty project, but ultimately it's attacking the symptom, not the cause.

frozenport• 12 years ago

Now put up competing adds. Change pepsi to coke. No too far bro.

uptown• 12 years ago

I wrote something in college that attempted to remove the station logos TV networks embedded in the corner of broadcast video. This was back before they started making them animated and jump around. At the time they were usually semi-transparent, and fixed in a corner. My software would determine the location on the screen, then interpolate the correct color to replace each pixel with based on a guess on how transparent the logo was, what color it thought was behind that pixel, blended with a nearest-neighbor average color weighted based on how close to the logo edge that pixel was. Worked pretty well for most cases, though my implementation was all doing this as post-processing - not in real-time.

kszx2• 12 years ago

Does anybody remember the name of the cult movie where all advertisement is blocked from the real world? It's pretty much the same idea. I remember seeing that movie many years ago.

kszx2• 12 years ago

Found it: "They Live" by John Carpenter.

The idea is a bit different though. "Nada discovers the sunglasses are special. After putting on a pair, he sees the world in black and white and discovers it is not what it seems. Media and advertising hide constant subliminal totalitarian commands to obey and conform." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live)

Here you can see how the "sunglasses" work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI8AMRbqY6w

[Added additional information]

blackhaz2• 12 years ago

Practical real world adblock: http://www.euronews.com/2014/11/24/green-and-noble-french-ci...

_noodly_• 12 years ago

It would be great if it were the size of contact lenses, and had far higher refresh rate.

Yet I don't think I would use it, since in daily life, I don't see many ads.

The only ads I have to block are online, because they impact negatively my UX with the content.

bnegreve• 12 years ago

In daily life, I don't see many ads.

Clearly advertising works, so some people must be exposed and influenced by it. This product is useful for those people.

Do you have a reason to believe that you are less exposed or influenced than the average person?

(I can't find a way to phrase it in a non-jerkish way, but it's actually a genuine question)

cronin101• 12 years ago

Finally, a convenient way to make your daily life resemble any MTV* rap video from the last two decades.

*Back when MTV actually played music videos.

gearhart• 12 years ago

Could somebody explain to me this community's fervent objection to advertising? It seems so out of sync with (y)our usual socially liberal / libertarian capitalist standpoint.

blackhaz2• 12 years ago

Some spaces aren't meant for advertising. Like dreams, hospitals, streets, parks, schools, and so on. I have nothing against advertising, but I wish advertisers would have more respect to the I part of my I/O.

coldpie• 12 years ago

With few exceptions, an advertiser's job is to convince people to spend money on things they don't need. Often these things are actively harmful, like soda or cigarettes. Advertisers use manipulation to achieve these goals. They're not honest about the pros and cons of a product, they're not informative about what the product is. Instead they rely on manipulative techniques like catchy jingles, flashing banner ads, false "experts," or any other number of slimy techniques to convince people to do things they wouldn't or shouldn't do.

tux1968• 12 years ago

But you are committing "theft" if you are wearing this technology and look at your web-browser while it is trying to show you an ad?

Really makes it obvious that the browser-ad-blocking-is-theft argument is bunk.

Famicoman• 12 years ago

Incredibly awesome considering the time constraint. I almost went to PennApps as my company was a sponsor, but had to sit out. Had I went, I would have suggested replacing the ads with "Consume, "Obey," or "Marry and reproduce."

An experimental real world adblock

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