• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, February 2, 2015

Consider this your post-Super Bowl hangover cure post. After a day immersed in American advertising at its best and worst, let’s step back and imagine a world where there are no logos, where the iconography of consumer capitalism can be erased. Yes, advanced technology may some day allow all of us to opt out of the commercial environment altogether.

Typically, augmented reality projects have been used to add commercial messaging to your view of things. Branded overlays, maps, animated pop-ups from 2D objects are all the usual tools of AR. How about if we used the technology to subtract rather than add to our view of the world?

Four enterprising programmers  from the PennApp hackathon recently demoed a technology that erases (or digitally blocks) commercial logos from view, through a head-mounted display. "Brand Killer is a technology demonstration that envisions a future in which consumers can use augmented reality to opt out of corporate influence," according to the developers.

Good luck with that last part. If these kids really think that logos are the sum total of corporate influence on their lives, well, they probably haven’t graduated yet.

Of course the headset required for this ad-blocking project is a fright. It makes Google Glass look stylish. It is a tech demo after all, and I could imagine it eventually making its way into the heads-up displays the VR enthusiasts would all love us to be wearing in 2020.

But the idea of tying overlay technology into commercial and logo databases does raise interesting prospects for ad-blocking of many kinds. Imagine interception technology applied to set-top boxes, blocking both advertising and branded entertainment. Go one step further into a "Minority Report"-like world, when we have implants that project not only our unique identifier to billboards and signage but also opt-out preferences.

One of the lessons of this exercise in advertising disruption is that the same technologies that marketers may imagine to be a boon to reaching consumers are the same tools consumers might yield in turning brand off -- literally.