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Comment by floatrock | Hacker News Reader

Opening up a whole new dimension of adtech personalization/engagement here... more evil brainstorming:

- electronic billboards on the bus corner start doing this while walking down the street

- your favorite peacock sitcom starts injecting your friends or recent vacation locations or friends' recent vacation locations on the main character's digital picture frame. Your buddy recently went to Sandals Resort in Jamaica? Now that's going to be emphasized in the unused screen real estate in the background of the bar scene to play on your fomo.

- hell, sporting games already have digital billboards on the field barriers that are customized for different markets / broadcasters... why not customize them further for the individual stream

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There’s a scene in Minority Report of a mall and it’s basically this. The billboards scan you and then target you directly as you go by.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7bXJ_obaiYQ

I've always wondered about that scene: does everyone around him see him in the ads as well? If so, that would mean that they're appropriating his image to sell to others. Perhaps they're laser / audio projections, so each person only sees their own ad.

Or worse: he needed to consent to a TC that allows they do use his image if he wanted to enter the shopping.

Dude don't go posting ideas like this on HN. Come on man.

So do I. Either people in the Minority Report world are immune to all that constant visual and audio noise thrown at them, and everyone hears every slogan along with names. Or these ads are somehow personalized and isolated voice (while portrayed as an unified mess) reaches particular person based on their movement in the public space.

Phased array speakers can focus sound in a specific direction. The visuals I don't have a good answer for but the sound part could definitely be done with existing technology

If you take a listen to the linked video, you'll hear other names than his.

There are already displays that do this, no lasers necessary. I forget the name for them though… maybe a type of lenticular display?

Cool use case: personalizing wayfinding signage e.g. in an airport

Bad use case: most of the rest of them

Truly one of the most prophetic movies in recent memory. It started out innocently enough with people just stealing the gestures and UIs from the film. But we have now progressed to also taking the highly targeted and personalized advertising coupled with mass surveillance and even the idea of precrime that is now being built around AI as if that is more accurate than the fantastical psychics of the movie. Just another example of us creating the torment nexus.

Philip K Dick was a genius, and this story was from the 70s!

About 4 years ago I was at a VC pitch day and one of the teams rehearsing their pitch before hand was basically proposing this for augmented reality. I was mildly horrified that people saw that sort of thing as something people would want, but hey - $$$ is all that matters right? I really hope those folks never got funded.

Why do you think Meta bought VR tech and took it further? To pour ads directly into our brains. It's just that scuba sized VR tech it didn't catch on, so instead they invested in Luxottica now to make AR fashion items with the same purpose.

Creating fake personal memories with faked personal photos and product placements?

I can see it now. You get an ad showing you in prison. The text reads, “I shouldn’t have downloaded that torrent without NordVPN.”

Welcome to our new dystopian hellscape.

This sounds like hell.

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