Latest news with #StijnSpanhove
Gizmodo
5 days ago
- Gizmodo
Ad Blockers for Real Life Are Now a Thing, Thanks to AR Glasses
I don't know much about you, dear reader, but I can probably guess one thing: you don't like watching advertisements (shut up, ad lovers; no one's talking to you). If you're one of the many, many ad-averse, you probably have an ad blocker installed on your devices, which is great when you're staring into the void of life's many glowing rectangles as one does every day for the rest of their lives. But those blockers do little to help you out in the real world when you're touching grass or a dirty subway pole. If only there were ad blockers for real life… Ask and ye shall receive, they say, and in this case, that means ye receive ad blockers designed to work with AR glasses for blocking ads in real life. 🚫🕶️ I've been building an XR app for a real-world ad blocker using Snap @Spectacles. It uses Gemini to detect and block ads in the environment. It's still early and experimental, but it's exciting to imagine a future where you control the physical content you see. — Stijn Spanhove (@stspanho) June 19, 2025Above is an app being developed by software engineer Stijn Spanhove for Snap's Spectacle AR glasses. As Spanhove states in the above post on X, the app uses a combination of the Spectacles' cameras and Google's Gemini to identify an ad in your glasses and then slap a big blocker over them. Ad blocking is not a novel idea, obviously, but it's still pretty wild to be able to bring that ad-blocking tech out into the world. The app, just like AR glasses themselves, is still a work in progress, but it's nice to see someone out here extending the use case of a technology that companies like Meta and Apple are betting big on. My only complaint, like some AR nerds, is that there are actually a lot of fun things outside a typical block screen you could use to obscure ads, and some of those things are a little bit more creative. On X, one user suggests family photos are local foliage—you know, things that don't suck. Unless you hate your family, which is a whole other issue I'm not prepared to unpack right now. Cats would be fun! Or puppies. I don't really care much what it is as long as it protects my eyes from the scourge of Shen Yun ads. But also, I'm an open-minded guy, and maybe you want everything to be a Shen Yun ad, in which case, have at it, bud. Spanhove's app is mostly just a fun exercise at this point, but if Snap actually brings its Spectacles to market in a broader sense—its latest version is developer-only—then maybe we'll see more apps like this in the wild. For now, you'll just have to take all your ads to the face, though, which is an L for us tired consumers but a big win for Shen Yun.
Metro
04-07-2025
- Metro
Black Mirror-like glasses let you block ads in real life
Hiyah Zaidi Published July 4, 2025 4:58pm Updated July 4, 2025 4:58pm Link is copied Comments We are always being exposed to adverts. Even Netflix has changed its model just so it can create an ad plan where you pay less but you have to endure ad breaks. Often online we can press that handy little 'X' in the corner to shut down the pop-up, but there's no such solution in real life, right? Well, maybe soon there will be. A software engineer posted an experiment of a pair or augmented reality glasses that could block ads (Picture: Stijn Spanhove) Do you remember that Black Mirror episode where people could block other people in real life? It works something like that, just not quite as dystopian. When you wear the smart glasses and look at a billboard, a red rectangle pops up to block the offending visual clutter from your view (Picture: Stijn Spanhove) Stin Spanhove, a Belgian programmer, is the brain behind the glasses, who used Snap's fifth-generation AR Spectacles. He engineered Google's Gemini AI to identify advertisements visible through the smart glasses and promptly blocked them, replacing the advertisement with a red square, while also naming the brand it has hidden (Picture: Stijn Spanhove) In a post on X, he wrote: 'I've been building an XR app for a real-world ad blocker using Snap Spectacles. It uses Gemini to detect and block ads in the environment. It's still early and experimental, but it's exciting to imagine a future where you control the physical content you see.' A video shows the glasses in action, with the app correctly identifying and visually blocking out ads on posters, pedestrian billboards, and a newspaper, and it can even block out brand names on food packaging (Picture: Stijn Spanhove) Although the app is still in its early stages, it reveals the possibilities of removing ads from your life, and the programmer is even thinking of a way that lets users customise the red squares, replacing them with anything from personal photos to to-do lists. Unfortunately, however, the app is put together using Snap's Depth Cache dev tools, so right now it is only available exclusively to Snap's AR Spectacles, so Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro wearers will have to wait (Picture: Stijn Spanhove) Augmented reality (AR) enhances the world we live in, and creates a partial digital world on top of what we ordinarily see. Whereas virtual reality creates a fully virtual world which allows for a complete immersion of the human senses – which isn't so great for when you're out and about (Picture: Stijn Spanhove) Snap Spectacles are developed by Snap Inc, the company behind Snapchat. The company plans to release a sixth-generation of its augmented reality glasses in 2026. Its next-generation glasses will be called Specs – however, they are still yet to release a price and launch date. Their most recent Spectacles were released in September 2024 to developers only, and only available under a leasing model that required users to commit to paying $99 (£73) a month for a full year. The company launched its first Spectacles glasses in 2016, but that was limited to simple features like helping users shoot short videos that they could post to Snapchat. The update to augmented reality displays happened in 2021 (Picture: Getty)
