Most of the visions for AR seem to show a world even more bombarded with information and ads.<p>But what if the killer app for AR will be an Ad Blocker? Imagine walking down a street that's filled with advertisement signs and you put your AR glasses on and those ads disappear.<p>What do you guys think of that? Would you care for something like that?
To reliably recognize something as an ad, as opposed to important information, would require very sophisticated processing. Scenario: "Sorry officer, I didn't see that road sign, my glasses thought it was a billboard."<p>And you need to do it in real time, within the constraints imposed by a device you wear on your nose.<p>If you are Google or Microsoft Research, maybe this is something worth thinking about.
Yeah, that's a hard problem. The computer can safely add contextual information but when it starts deciding that you don't need to see things you're really taking a risk. Personally I couldn't see myself trusting AR when I know it's blocking out parts of the world.<p>I don't see how AR would bombard its user with anything. It's your AR rig. Just, like, turn off push notifications or whatever.<p>Anywho, you could probably pay for solving the hard problem by charging advertisers for 1) the data on what ads the user sees and how long their eyes stay on them and 2) bidding to replace or not replace ads and 3) the data on what context the user is utilizing AR.<p>That being said...nobody's going to be wearing AR rigs in public for a long time. Maybe there's a niche where early adopters will wear AR rigs in public? Maybe something like Google Maps drivers? They're just driving around looking at stuff all day anyway. Maybe guided tours?