A Developer Built A Real-World Ad Blocker For Snap Spectacles
A developer built a real-world ad blocker for Snap Spectacles, though the limited opacity and field of view make it squarely a proof of concept.
A real-world ad blocker for Snap Spectacles raises interesting questions about what shipping AR glasses will allow.
On the internet, ads are shown to enable companies to offer products and services for free. Much of UploadVR's revenue, for example, comes from the programmatic ads you see on this page unless you're a member. If everyone used an online ad blocker, services like ours would have to charge, and most likely go bust. In the physical world though, ad spaces like billboards are often sold by already profitable businesses and public services charging money. Further, these ads are visible in public spaces.
One day, could these physical ads be blocked?
Software developer Stijn Spanhove 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.
Spanhove 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. This enables detecting and labeling real-world objects, for example. Or, in the case of Spanhove's project, projecting a red rectangle onto real-world ads.
David Heaney
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.
The other problem is that see-through transparent AR systems have a very limited field of view. In the case of Spectacles, just 46 degrees diagonal. So ads are only "blocked" whenever you're looking directly at them, and you'll still see them when you're not.
David Heaney
Earlier this month, Snap announced that it plans to launch "much smaller" AR glasses as a consumer product, called Specs, in 2026. While it will have a slightly wider field of view, it will almost certainly be in the same ballpark, and thus its prospects for practical real-world ad blocking will be much the same.
