Ads are displayed on the Internet to allow companies to provide products and services at no cost. UploadVR, for instance, gets a large portion of its revenue from programmatic advertisements. Our services would be forced to charge if everyone blocked online ads. They’d also most likely fail if they did. These ads are also visible in public spaces. Further, these ads are visible in public spaces.
One day, could these physical ads be blocked?
Software developer
used the newest SDK features of Snap OS to build a prototype of this for Snap Spectacles.
If you’re unfamiliar, Snap Spectacles are a bulky AR glasses development kit available to rent for $99/month. They run Snap OS, the company’s made-for-AR operating system, and developers build apps called Lenses for them using Lens Studio or WebXR.Stijn SpanhoveSpanhove built the real-world ad blocker using the new Depth Module API of Snap OS, integrated with the vision capability of Google’s Gemini AI via the cloud.
The Depth Module API caches depth frames, meaning that coordinate results from cloud vision models can be mapped to positions in 3D space. It is possible to detect and label real-world items, using this API. Or, in the case of Spanhove’s project, projecting a red rectangle onto real-world ads.
However, while the software approach used for Spanhove’s real-world ad blocker is sound, two fundamental hardware limitations mean it wouldn’t be a practical way to avoid seeing ads in your reality.
Firstly, the imagery rendered by see-through transparent AR systems like Spectacles isn’t fully opaque. Thus, as you can see in the demo clip, the ads are still visible through the blocking rectangle.
Snap Spectacles Are $100/Month AR Glasses For Developers
The company behind Snapchat just unveiled upgraded AR Spectacles, available to developers for $99/month.
The other problem is that see-through transparent AR systems have a very limited field of view. Spectacles have a diagonal field of view that is only 46 degrees. Snap announced earlier this month that they plan to release “much smaller AR glasses” as a consumer item, called Specs in 2026. It will likely have a wider field of vision, but it’s still in the ballpark. This means that it has the same chances for blocking ads.