Ad Blockers for Real Life Are Now a Thing, Thanks to AR Glasses

I don’t know much about you, dear reader, but I can probably guess one thing: you don’t like watching advertisements (shut up, ad lovers; no one’s talking to you). If you’re one of the many, many ad-averse, you probably have an ad blocker installed on your devices, which is great when you’re staring into the void of life’s many glowing rectangles as one does every day for the rest of their lives. But those blockers do little to help you out in the real world when you’re touching grass or a dirty subway pole. If only there were ad blockers for real life…

Ask and ye shall receive, they say, and in this case, that means ye receive ad blockers designed to work with AR glasses for blocking ads in real life.

🚫🕶️ 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

Above is an app being developed by software engineer Stijn Spanhove for Snap’s Spectacle AR glasses. As Spanhove states in the above post on X, the app uses a combination of the Spectacles’ cameras and Google’s Gemini to identify an ad in your glasses and then slap a big blocker over them. Ad blocking is not a novel idea, obviously, but it’s still pretty wild to be able to bring that ad-blocking tech out into the world. The app, just like AR glasses themselves, is still a work in progress, but it’s nice to see someone out here extending the use case of a technology that companies like Meta and Apple are betting big on.

My only complaint, like some AR nerds, is that there are actually a lot of fun things outside a typical block screen you could use to obscure ads, and some of those things are a little bit more creative. On X, one user suggests family photos are local foliage—you know, things that don’t suck. Unless you hate your family, which is a whole other issue I’m not prepared to unpack right now. Cats would be fun! Or puppies. I don’t really care much what it is as long as it protects my eyes from the scourge of Shen Yun ads. But also, I’m an open-minded guy, and maybe you want everything to be a Shen Yun ad, in which case, have at it, bud.

Spanhove’s app is mostly just a fun exercise at this point, but if Snap actually brings its Spectacles to market in a broader sense—its latest version is developer-only—then maybe we’ll see more apps like this in the wild. For now, you’ll just have to take all your ads to the face, though, which is an L for us tired consumers but a big win for Shen Yun.