Now You See It, Now You Don’t

In today’s digital world of constant distractions, attention is a valuable commodity. It seems like everyone has something to say, and they all want to find a way to get you to listen. But there are only just so many hours in a day, and nobody wants to spend them all learning about the latest gadgets, trendy fashion must-haves, or miracle weight loss solutions, so we have had to adapt. Most of us have developed strategies, often including ad-blocking software, to filter out distractions and help us stay focused.

This problem is not purely digital, however. These constant distractions extend into the real world in the form of billboards, posters, and ads printed on just about every surface imaginable. At times, the world around us feels like a late-90s website that is peppering us with pop-up ads. A potential solution to this annoyance has recently been proposed by a software engineer named Stijn Spanhove. He has created a pair of augmented reality (AR) glasses that block ads in the real world.

The system is built around a pair of Snapchat Spectacles AR glasses. These glasses capture a steady stream of images of what the wearer is seeing, then forward them into the multimodal Google Gemini large language model. Gemini is instructed to locate the position of advertisements in each image, then that information is used to cover them up with red rectangles in the AR view that the user sees.

Whether a world full of advertisements or large, red rectangles is more appealing will certainly be a personal decision. The ad blocker is still in the early stages of development, however, so there is still the possibility that it will change in the future. Perhaps instead of red boxes it might reproduce nearby surfaces in AR to make the ads seem to disappear in a later version.

While this device is designed to block ads, the scope of what it blocks could be extended, which raises a number of important questions. In theory, a person could block anything that they do not like from their view using a system like this. But is that a good thing? Such a technology would likely contribute to modern problems in which many people isolate themselves in echo chambers where they never have to hear an opinion that they disagree with. So as is typically the case with new technologies, these glasses are a double-edged sword. They can free us from distractions, but they also have the potential to isolate and divide us.