Here’s a fun game to play sometime; go on an errand you normally run and just count every logo and advertisement you see. You’ll probably be surprised how much of your surroundings are dedicated to making you aware of stuff you might consider buying, from store signs to logos to posters to the products themselves. A team of college students wants to change that.
The technology is relatively simple: You wear some goggles that feed everything through a camera. The image is processed via a database of ads, logos, and other marketing materials, and if there’s a match, it slaps a blur filter over it. There you go! You are free of advertising, or at least all the advertising for which college students are able to build a database. Notably, when they demonstrate it with a T-shirt, the Google subsidy Nest doesn’t have its name blurred out.
There’s perhaps an unintentional statement there in that you have to use augmented reality technology to block out advertising in the real world. But nonetheless, it’s a fun, clever little piece of tech, and one we suspect will have a brief vogue among technohippies until somebody attempts to drive a car while wearing it.