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

beyondthescreen.substack.com

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

#31

Post by Animats »

rapnie wrote: post #6
alexanderbz wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Hyper Reality by Keiichi Matsuda: http://hyper-reality.co/

Yes, that's the classic. I've linked that video before, but didn't know the creator had a web site. That's what I expected Facebook/Meta/Oculus/Zuckerberg to ship as augmented reality. It's quite do-able with Apple's new headgear, although that thing is too bulky and doesn't have the battery life for full-time wear.

There's a line in the Ready Player One movie where the big bad is discussing how much of the human visual field they can fill with ads before inducing seizures. I was expecting this years ago, as Google Glass 2.x, but nobody has yet been able to get the size and cost down for untethered headgear.

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

#32

Post by hinkley »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #2

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…

> 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.

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

#35

Post by EA-3167 »

ArekDymalski wrote: post #28

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.

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.

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

#36

Post by EA-3167 »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #5
alexanderbz wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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

It'll be amazing if that level of tracking proves advertising is grossly overpriced and only modestly effective.

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

#37

Post by PaulHoule »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #22
tiedieconderoga wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

I do art projects involving QR code, at first I was happy about this development because it was getting people to scan QR codes (no mean feat on the OS whose logo is a trash can) but I found the backlash disturbing.

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

#39

Post by JamesLeonis »

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

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

#40

Post by aprinsen »

hinkley wrote: post #32
throwaway22032 wrote: post #2

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…

> 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 happe…

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
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