These AR Glasses Let You Block Ads in the Physical World

There’s a small but unsettling part of the Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise movie Minority Report that’s always stuck with me. John Anderton, the character played by Cruise, is on the run from the law, but in this dystopian future where the surveillance state has been thoroughly incorporated into every square inch of life, advertisements he passes ID him and start making pitches directly to him, calling him out by name. It’s the algorithmic advertising targeting of the Internet brought into the physical world. This is what came to mind when I read about Stijn Spanhove, a Belgian software engineer who created ad blocker glasses for the real world.

In a technology that seems like a combination of Minority Report and They Live and that one Jon Hamm episode of Black Mirror, Spanhove developed a prototype augmented reality app that works like a pop-up blocker for your eyeballs, filtering out physical advertisements as you walk past them.

🚫🕶️ 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. pic.twitter.com/ySkFfF6rxS

— Stijn Spanhove (@stspanho) June 19, 2025

The They Live part of it comes in the glasses that make it all work, Snap’s AR Spectacles, which is using Google’s Gemini AI to identify ads in the real world and slap of big red censor box over them so you don’t have to worry about being sold the latest movie or new type of dishwashing detergent.

It creates a clean, ad-free world…by filling it with gigantic red boxes that let you know you’re looking at ads. The box is itself so intrusive that it kinda makes me miss seeing the ads. Maybe it would be better if it replaced them with beautiful (public domain) works of art? That’s just my suggestion, though. Ignore me if that idea sucks.

In a demo video, the app is seen identifying and blocking everything from posters and billboards to logos on food packaging. It even labels the red boxes with the offending brand names just in case you wanted to keep a blacklist.

The tool is still in its early stages, and Spanhove admits it’s more of a proof-of-concept than a polished product, but the potential here is wild. He’s also hinted at letting users customize the red squares, replacing them with anything from personal photos to to-do lists.

The app is cobbled together from Snap’s Depth Cache dev tools, meaning it’s currently exclusive to Snap’s AR Spectacles. If you’re rocking an Apple Vision Pro or a Meta Quest, you’ll have to wait your turn to digitally obliterate every logo as far as the eye can see. Ad blockers helped flip the internet’s financial mechanisms on their head, upping the ante in a war that pits commerce, intrusiveness, and the realities of operating a functioning online business against one another.

What happens when that struggle is brought into the real world, and suddenly people who couldn’t escape advertisements now get the option to never see an ad ever again if they so choose? Do advertising tactics get bolder, more obnoxious, more difficult to ignore? Probably. Do people start buying less stuff than they did before because they’re not as aware of products and services as they used to be? That remains to be seen.

We’re still firmly in the stage where we can recognize that a guy made a cool thing and appreciate it on that level alone, while the distant shouts of all those complicated questions exist in the background, just quiet enough to ignore. For now.