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An experimental real world adblock

• Paul-ish 12y ago
  This could well for people who record a lot of video and don't want to remove the brands manually.
• nsgi 12y ago
  This reminds me of the Black Mirror episode White Christmas (only blocking ads instead of people).
  • dubin 12y ago
    Hey, I'm from the team that worked on this at PennApps. This episode was actually our inspiration for the device!
    • nogridbag 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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!
    • TeMPOraL 12y 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 12y ago
  It would be pretty cool if you could replace advertisements altogether. Imagine driving down the road instead of billboards you see art work.
  • derekjobst 12y ago
    That is such a great idea.
    • zzkt 12y ago
      something like The Artvertiser perhaps? http://theartvertiser.com/ http://theartvertiser.com/
    • bduerst 12y ago
      Billboards are expensive. Who would pay to put art up there? Artists? Then you're back at artists advertising their work.
      • sparky_z 12y ago
        He meant it would be nice to have this AR technology replace the ads with artwork in your field of vision.
  • VLM 12y 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.
    • TeMPOraL 12y ago
      It's been done already. Someone hacked a street billboard in Russia once to play pornography.
  • mrtron 12y ago
    And replace brand logos with accurate descriptions. Instead of blurring the label, translate Coca Cola -> Cola Soda Pop (355ml/300 cals)
• tarr11 12y ago
  Replace "ads" with "things I don't agree with" and you have quite the filter bubble.
  • derekjobst 12y ago
    People already do this online. Facebook is very good at making sure you only see what you agree with.
    • unknownian 12y ago
      I think that was GP's point, but true nonetheless.
    • lotharbot 12y 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.
    • dragonwriter 12y 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.)
    • 12y ago
• zach_daily 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
    We could probably start laying the ground work by adding billboards to openstreetmaps
• ArekDymalski 12y ago
  I'm waiting for someone to hack it and replace the blur with "OBEY" ;)
  • Amorymeltzer 12y ago
    FNORD
• spain 12y 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 12y 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.
    • spain 12y ago
      > We called the project Brand Killer. Ah neat, that certainly is a lot more fitting of a description.
    • apt-bunt 12y ago
      Do you also block out images of Nicki Minaj? ...because apparently she is also a "brand."
  • pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    Surely a logo - like on a coffee cup - is an advert for a brand?
    • spain 12y 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.
      • pbhjpbhj 12y ago
• nfoz 12y 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 12y 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.
    • nfoz 12y 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.
      • TeMPOraL 12y ago
        Exactly. There is a qualitative difference between what pavel_lishin mentioned and ads, which while originally meant to inform people, now grew into a social cancer.
  • minthd 12y 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 12y 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 http://wearcam.org/diminished_reality.htm via http://cyborganthropology.com/Diminished_Reality http://cyborganthropology.com/Diminished_Reality
• c22 12y ago
  When everyone's wearing this I'm gonna dress up as Ronald McDonald and walk invisibly through the crowds.
  • Someone1234 12y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
    • tomrod 12y ago
      Sounds lovely. How many angles would be needed for total vision blockage?
    • 542458 12y 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/ http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/projects/currency/
      • rangibaby 12y ago
        I don't have a screenshot handy, but I definitely got this error last year when I tried to open a picture of some bank notes in Photoshop. GIMP had no such qualms :-)
        • Logmix 12y ago
          Seconded. I played around with it for a while as well - creating images in a different image editing app and then opening them in photoshop to see when the warning is triggered.
• spb 12y 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-reality-app-blocks-advertisements-with-digital-art http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/this-augmented-reali...
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• hokkos 12y ago
  Now, that would be something useful for the Hololens.
• ingenter 12y 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-bunt 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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?
• TeMPOraL 12y 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 12y 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.
  • cLeEOGPw 12y ago
    By your logic we should stop fighting diseases, i.e. killing bacteria, to prevent bacteria from evolving.
    • TeMPOraL 12y 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 12y ago
  Along the same lines of porting things to the real world: this DRM chair. http://vimeo.com/60475086 http://vimeo.com/60475086
  • teddyh 12y ago
    See also SeatSale: License to Sit: http://wearcam.org/seatsale/ http://wearcam.org/seatsale/
• johnloeber 12y 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?
  • chii 12y 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 12y 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.
    • cLeEOGPw 12y ago
      AR app that helps you change a tire and at the same time shows ads on the tires.
• Terr_ 12y 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.)
  • chii 12y 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_ 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
    https://www.paperkarma.com/ https://www.paperkarma.com/
    • click170 12y 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 12y ago
    https://www.catalogchoice.org/ https://www.catalogchoice.org/ ?
• erickhill 12y 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_Substance 12y 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 12y ago
      I have a bottle of floor cleaner that comes in the exaxt sake bottles that orange juice does.
      • Sir_Substance 12y ago
        I feel like that's probably a flaw in your packaging legislation rather then with this product. Pretty sure in Australia you're not allowed to package hazardous liquids in the same bottles as food, and if you are shame on us as well. Sure, it might be a problem in the future for people wearing brand obfuscatory equipment, but it's an inexcusable flaw in your packing laws right now that's endangering anyone with Macular degeneration.
• elihu 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
    I like this idea, and it's entirely possible with the CSS `filter: blur(10px)`.
• brightsize 12y 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 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...
• vacri 12y 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 12y ago
  Now put up competing adds. Change pepsi to coke. No too far bro.
• uptown 12y 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.
• kszx 12y 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.
  • kszx 12y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live) Here you can see how the "sunglasses" work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI8AMRbqY6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI8AMRbqY6w [Added additional information]
• blackhaz 12y ago
  Practical real world adblock: http://www.euronews.com/2014/11/24/green-and-noble-french-city-grenoble-to-get-rid-of-street-advertising/ http://www.euronews.com/2014/11/24/green-and-noble-french-ci...
• _noodly_ 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.
  • blackhaz 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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."