Adblock is a very common extension for Google Chrome users these days. Advertisers don’t like it, but it blocks out nearly all advertisements, including ads before youtube videos and it cuts out commercials on sites like Pandora.
Brand Killer is a type of “real life Adblock” that was developed by undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania that removes ads that can be seen in real life. They are goggles that you wear, which is relevant only because Google Glass has been on the horizon. Although whether or not Google glass will come to fruition soon is hard to say.
It has no practical application as of yet, but it is very interesting to see that undergraduates were able to create a real-time “Adblock” that blurs out ads as you see them in real life. If college students can do it with limited resources, large corporations with deeper pockets could create a far better product. The goggles that people use now are large and clunky, and was obviously just half experiment; half science project.
The application for a technology like this hasn’t really been thought about yet, but there must be some way to harness visual modifiers in a way that can be useful. When a large tech company decides to look into what they can do with it, the first place they will need to go is the University of Pennsylvania to see just exactly how these college kids managed to do something so intricate.