The Wild (and Slightly Terrifying) Future of Inescapable AR Ads
beyondthescreen.substack.com
beyondthescreen.substack.com
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 being screens.
And even if they don't share it- they can still use it for selling ads on their platform.
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.
I think it's pretty clear where that trajectory is already headed. Proprietary Apps are not the web, and your adblock browser extensions are irrelevant when everything relevant is an App.
FTR this is not the future I want, it's just the future I see.
We need a new and better Mozilla analog to champion the web browser and push things forward to where the best way to develop the best Apps is the open Web. It's a huge problem when companies clearly vested in a closed-App walled-garden future dominate the browser market.
We already have AR/VR (XR) being built into the current web (W3C webxr), and people building out Web based AR. Take a look at 8th Wall.
There will be a long transition period where webxr have the chance to shine and prevent the wall garden future of private apps.
That's simply unsustainable long-term. It happens to work today that you can trivially block them at the network level, because they're still unsophisticated about how ads are delivered, in this still mixed open-Web-transitioning-to-closed-Apps world.
Long-term, ad-serving becomes more sophisticated, in-band, and indistinguishable from any other App data over an encrypted stream from the App vendor and/or walled-garden provider, or just bundled with the now-normalized constant App "updates" without the need for network access when displaying them at all.
You're on the losing side of an arms race when everything's closed.
Even if you prefer living in walled gardens, preserving the open Web escape hatch does a lot of heavy lifting in the checks and balances department. If it's entirely deprecated by society, the walled gardens will get exponentially worse with their increased leverage.
I'd like to mention, that I don't prefer closed gardens and out of principle don't use anything app only. My phone is for calls, the bath, and my bed. Plus the rare traveling.
I don't, and life goes on as before
Asia and European sound a lot more far gone in this area though and I feel like the days are numbered here.
As a German: Why? All scam-app checkins during the pandemic were also doable via paper (I refused to install the damn app), pretty much everything I can do on my phone, I can also do by paper (which I have to for my health insurance, damn TK is not only the most digitally progressive health insurance, they also seem to be the only app existing on Android with an almost uncircumventable root detection). The only exception would be my bank, but that’s because I chose a neobank which requires a smartphone to even sign up.
which? If they require a works phone they will give you one. Leave it at home and use it only for work.
There are enough people who like, enjoy breathing normal air and seeing plants.
Maybe if it becomes a brain implant at some point. I hope to be long gone before then.
This has been a big fear of mine since I started studying CS. Implants that are still not fully proven safe, but create a massive productivity gain. This might make the choice to get a sketchy implant or be unemployed.
The more savvy users will have a better experience, exerting more control using free (or crowd-funded) tools which block ads. The mainstream companies will continue to make the computing experience an ad-filled privacy nightmare for everyone else.
Also like now is the "Wargames" aspect of it - the computing landscape is already such an ad-filled privacy nightmare that, "The only winning move is not to play".
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 and companies to put displays and audio announcements everywhere?
¹: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/04/my-lif...
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 used one QR menu during coronavirus and then started going elsewhere. To be honest restaurants during the pandemic were awful anyway, far more fun to just have friends over for dinner.
I have a fairly varied social life, if anything I probably drink too much. This doesn't match up with reality to me.
Unavoidable means just that - cannot be avoided. To avoid using QR codes doesn't even involve trying.
I think people sometimes forget that you can inconvinience a waitress without being an asshole about it (they are there to provide service) and that being able to be a customer is important enough that most businesses would prefer staff spend time helping you.
Sure they would prefer you have a smartphone, and it may be less convinient but that doesn't mean they can't work to accomondate you.
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.
Not all fads get adopted. AR is in my opinion still a tech before its time, which makes it a fad - for now - but not necessarily forever. Cellphones and particularly smart watches are a form of ambient technology that have caught on, and I think it's only a matter of process shrinkage and battery tech before it happens. Say another 7-10 years for battery density to double again. Early ebooks were objectively as bad as current or last generation VR equipment. Nobody was going to adopt that. It's a matter of connecting the dots.
If you don't like the idea of everyone in AR, that's fine. Then I recommend you start now to participate in environmental and conservation special interest groups, because there is a day coming when philosophers, ascetics, and people who touch trees on purpose are the main demographics of people who actively reject augmentation for augmentation's sake. There are loud opinions in each of those groups, and they have merit.
And frankly we could use a few more science-minded tree huggers to dilute the conspiracy theorists.
I recall when baseball first started showing digital ads along the field wall -- at first they specifically made it look like static images, and would only swap out the digital ads during inning breaks (so you couldn't tell at a glance that it wasn't a static physical banner).
Turns out, a lot. Worse yet, we've been habituated into choosing platforms we don't control and taking corporate interests for granted. Once Apple and Microsoft realized that, it became open season for ad nagging. Constant service pop-ups, advertisements for music streaming, notifications begging you to try a different browser, dishonestly promoted search results and data-collection on app launch have all become the norm. We're fully habituated, with the illusion that we "control" things by paying extra for nicer looking advertisements.
> 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...
I LOL'd at bit at this. The following paragraphs do capture the issues neatly, but that sentence just comes off either as inspirational at best or naïve at worst.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g
Apr 27, 1999
This 'article' should not be on HN. Is alexanderbz the same Alexander who wrote it I wonder
Edit: I guess it is.
15 years ago you could reasonably tell someone "if you don't like it, then don't get a cell phone" but today that advice is no longer reasonable for cell phones. If AR ends up being a practical technology, we'll face the same issue in the future.
Let me put it in simple terms: if you don't want to take part in that aspect of society, then don't. The only power which technology has over people is that which people allow.