A recent hackathon yielded a head-mounted display that automatically detects and blurs ads. Getty Images/WIRED
Like nature, advertising abhors a vacuum. There’s no reason to assume that future virtual worlds—the fantastic ones we’ll inhabit inside headsets like Oculus Rift, or the augmented ones we might espy through devices like HoloLens—will be any different. The moment there’s a convincing simulacrum of Mars for you to explore, you can bet someone will be trying erect a billboard inside it.
But new technologies offer opportunities for subversion, as well. “Brand Killer,” created by a group of students for the PennApps hackathon, is one such exploration. It’s a customized head-mounted display that uses image processing to recognize brands and logos and blur them in real time. Think of it as ad-block for real life. The idea, its creators write, is to make people “blind to the excesses of corporate branding,” quite literally.
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