When you're online, a browser plugin can block all those annoying ads that pop up and clutter up your screen — but unfortunately we can't do that to ads in real life.

Yet, at least. That could all change after an enterprising software engineer posted an experiment with a pair of smart augmented reality glasses. When you don a pair of the specs and look at a billboard, or even the label on a food container, a red rectangle pops up to block the offending visual clutter from your view.

"It’s still early and experimental, but it’s exciting to imagine a future where you control the physical content you see," said the engineer in question, Stijn Spanhove of Belgium, in a X post flagged by Tom's Hardware.

The real-life ad blocker works by harnessing Snapchat's Spectacles, a pair of chunky black smart glasses built for augmented reality applications, according to Spanhove's explanation. He used Google's Gemini AI model as the tool to identify advertisements in real life and block them from view.

But the system still needs a little work. When you watch the specs in action, there's a momentary lag before the glasses pick up the presence of an ad and blocks it.

In replies to his original post, Spanhove said he hopes to develop his app further, and the red block may be replaced with other images of the user's choosing.

Back in 2015, a group of college students in Pennsylvania developed a head monitor that uses image processing software to blur out advertisements in real life. But it was a cumbersome helmet, so that device never left the proverbial garage.

Smart glasses as an industry have suffered some majors misfires, most notably the very ridicule-worthy Google Glass. But smart glasses seem to have shaken off their novelty factor and are making actual inroads now, such as the growing popularity of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

In his recent trip to China, popular streamer IShowSpeed donned a pair of smart glasses that could translate foreign languages in real time, which many people took as a hint that the tech is poised to go mainstream.

Perhaps as smart glasses become more ubiquitous, there will be a great clamor  for a real-life adblocker — or things that go much further, in a decidedly "Black Mirror" direction.

"Hmm — after objects, the natural next progression is to block out people you don’t want to see," someone quipped on Spanhove's post.

More on smart glasses: New Orleans Terrorist Used Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses, FBI Says


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