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Comment by yoodenvranx | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but doing it in augmented reality means that casino A could put ads _inside_ of casino B.

Just imagine casino A would pay some guys to carry advertising sign inside of casino B. Those guys would be removed instantly.

Or let's say somebody creates a AR game where you can leave signs with random texts everywhere. And then somebody decides to plant a sign with "OP is bundle of sticks" on your property. In the real world you can just remove the sign and call the cops, but what would you do in the AR world?

If there will be too much shenanigans I can see that in the future your real property boundary might translate into the virtual AR world.

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Inside

I can access the mcdonald's website when I am inside a burguer king.

I can phone a friend and get a suggestion to buy a Xbox when I am evaluating footage from a PS4.

I can be at home, access the starbucks website and get a pop-up from hangouts where a friend might ask me to have coffee... in his house!

What do you mean inside?

> Inside

It is currently not an issue but just imagine that something like Facebook/Twitter/Instagram explodes into AR space and _everybody_ starts using it as their main mode of interaction with people. If Burgerking buys all the virtual ad-space inside every McDonalds location then you can be sure that there will be lawsuits.

Yes. A virtual lawsuit, inside THAT instance of AR. Any number of AR can exist.

That is, until the meatspace law catches up. Until then, nobody but the AR creator can enforce anything.

Isn't the point of AR that the particular AR can contain anything feasible? Why should McDonald's tell me I can't use a Burger King app inside their store? (I guess they can, but that would be obnoxious.)

with "virtual lawsuit" I was not serious. I don't think complaining to Niantic counts as a lawsuit, but it is all McDonalds can do.

Yes. But you don't see a poster for a Whopper while looking at the McDonalds menu board, do you?

But why couldn't you be free to see the Whopper poster in that case? McDonalds owns the store, they don't own my vision while I'm in their store. Until we are given implants at birth, the user chooses to enable augmented reality

No, they do not own your vision. But where able, they certainly have the right to protect how their brand is presented inside their own property.

They can ban someone from using AR inside the store to protect their brand. But making it illegal for Burger King buy AR ads that display inside the store - I wonder if there's some precedent with radio

They already have that control. What they shouldn't control is the operation of someone else's app.

Answer one: "while looking at a McDonalds menu board" I am "looking at the McDonalds menu board", so no, I don't see anything else.

Answer two:

> That depends. Is this[0] covering my view, being used by my daughter?

> Am I comparing prices on the internet? Should McDonald's care, or have control over what happens inside my smartphone, or what I can see?

> Am I spoofing my (smartphone) location to pretend I am in fact inside a burguer king, and indeed seeing the Augmented Reality Giant Whooper they have, because I enjoy playing their minigames, but prefer to eat at McDonalds?

[0]: https://aww.moe/gwfjx0.jpg

Forgive me for taking this to an uncomfortable extreme of a hypothetical:

As a parent, would you seek to prevent an AR app from allowing overlays of an artificially created model of a beaten and bruised child over your child's body when a user looks at them?

As a spouse, would you seek to prevent an AR app from allowing overlays of a pornographic representation of their body when a user looks at them?

As a homeowner, would you seek to prevent an AR app from allowing overlays of "#blacklivesdontmatter" from appearing as graffiti when a user looks at your home?

No problem, I enjoy hypotheticals.

As a parent, spouse or homeowner, I wouldn't. I would like it to stop, in the same way I would like that guy downstairs to be nice to me.

But I will just postpone as long as I can to interact with people that use said AR app as lens for the world.

Because the problem is not the overlays. The problem is when people use the overlays / AR app as a truth finder. And I don't care much for those kinds of people, neither does anyone I care about.

I think this is overthought, though it's interesting insofar as the likely natural conclusion is you buy Augmented Reality Ad_Space to avoid this very thing.

In my mind, you can look at this two ways:

1. You can't tell people what they can and cannot look at on their technology just because they've entered your "space". Maybe sometime down the road competitive geo-blocking will be a thing (i.e., different companies will auction off parts of cities and let businesses buy up ad-relevancy based on location), but right now there's no such case. I think legally, this is the equivalent of someone walking into McDonalds and a Burger King happens to play on Spotify or there's a banner ad in an app for Wendy's.

2. The advertisement, despite using real world GPS coordinates, is occuring within the application, not an actual advertisement inside the store.

In a way, I guess the question really is "do you have a right to your GPS coordinates?", and I don't think you do. What people do with the coordinates elsewhere may be subject to some laws, but nothing in terms of commerce.

> Yes, but doing it in augmented reality means that casino A could put ads _inside_ of casino B.

While the general point you are trying to make still stands, as regards the specific example, I expect that the possibility of hostile ads is fairly far down the list of reasons that casinos, of all places, are going to crack down hard on any use of AR technology on the premises before long.

Is this augmented reality a public space or specific to an app? I'm thinking that will be one determinate.

I suspect this will eventually go the way domain names went. Initially, any random person would register microsoft.com, and Microsoft didn't have much recourse back then. Now they do, I believe, and I feel like this is a similar question of ownership of something virtual.

If you google Casino A, it's possible the adword at the top will be for Casino B. Just because I happen to physically be somewhere doesn't change things, it's still a virtual space that google owns and can give advertising space based on who pays the most.

Yeah, but try to go inside casino A and put stickers with ads for casino B on the walls. You will be thrown out within minutes for trespassing, property damage and other things.

Still missing the point, Casino A owns the physical space of Casino A. Google owns Pokemon database, the fact that the easiest way to access the content of this specific data inside of googles database is to be physically located on Casino A's premises does not change the ownership of that particular data.

This is all really straightforward, the mental gymnastics required to turn this into a problem is really mental masturbation.

Yelp has a "nearby" feature. If I pull up yelp while standing in a restaurant, do you think the restaurant should have full control over the reviews? Obviously, the answer should always be no. There's nothing really new here.

I think it's a who cares problem. What percentage of the people in a casino are going to be focused on some AR game? Of those people, how many are going to be anything but annoyed by ads?

It is currently not a problem at all. But just imagine something like Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Tinder/TripAdvisor/Yelp explodes into AR space and it becomes an essential part of daily life. If this somehow becomes reality then localized AR-ads will be very very valuable.

People still aren't going to be interacting with slot machines through the Facebook app. Or if they are, it will be because the home casino has arranged for it (so competitor ads wouldn't be in the interests of Facebook).

When I'm standing at the counter at McDonald's, an ad for Burger King is going to have to be really compelling to matter.

If you're wearing AR gear in the casino, you might see in the corner of your eye while playing the slot machine a little gambling Pokémon, inviting you to play with him for better odds than the stupid slot machine.

If you do like a google search on your phone in side casino a for local casinons you could reasonably getan ad for casino b now.

How are AR ads for casino A inside of casino B different from mobile ads that can do the same thing?

AR ads can be highly specific. If you are casino A then you want to reach all the people who usually go to casino B. What is the best way to reach those? Buy all the virtual ad-space at the location of casino B. This will be more effective than any Google Adsense or Facebook campaign.

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