Annoyed by billboards and banners on buildings? Now there is an ad blocker that will hide them. At least, it will try to.
Belgian programmer Stijn Spanhove has created an app for blocking ads using the fifth-generation Snap Spectacles augmented reality glasses Google Gemini artificial intelligence recognizes ads and promptly replaces them with a red square with a comment about the type of ad and advertiser. The video in X demonstrates how the glasses work with the blocker. The app correctly identifies and blocks ads on billboards, in newspapers, and even in objects on the table.
The author says that the project is at an early stage of development, but it’s interesting to imagine a future where you control the physical content you see. Spanhoff continues to think about future features that will allow users to replace the bright red forbidden square with their own in answering questions.
The ad blocker is built on top of the libraries and APIs that Snap share on Github, making it exclusive to Snap Spectacles for now. Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest users will have to wait a bit longer for a similar experience to be available to 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
Snap, best known for its Snapchat, is developing its augmented reality glasses since 2016. Initially, they were just glasses with a hidden camera, without augmented reality. While companies like Microsoft and Meta seem to have «slowed down» their augmented reality projects, Snap is not giving up and is offering its fifth-generation glasses to developers for $99 per month.
Source: Tom`s Hardware
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