Truly one of the most prophetic movies in recent memory. It started out innocently enough with people just stealing the gestures and UIs from the film. But we have now progressed to also taking the highly targeted and personalized advertising coupled with mass surveillance and even the idea of precrime that is now being built around AI as if that is more accurate than the fantastical psychics of the movie. Just another example of us creating the torment nexus.

Philip K Dick was a genius, and this story was from the 70s!

I've always wondered about that scene: does everyone around him see him in the ads as well? If so, that would mean that they're appropriating his image to sell to others. Perhaps they're laser / audio projections, so each person only sees their own ad.

Or worse: he needed to consent to a TC that allows they do use his image if he wanted to enter the shopping.

Dude don't go posting ideas like this on HN. Come on man.

So do I. Either people in the Minority Report world are immune to all that constant visual and audio noise thrown at them, and everyone hears every slogan along with names. Or these ads are somehow personalized and isolated voice (while portrayed as an unified mess) reaches particular person based on their movement in the public space.

Phased array speakers can focus sound in a specific direction. The visuals I don't have a good answer for but the sound part could definitely be done with existing technology

If you take a listen to the linked video, you'll hear other names than his.

There are already displays that do this, no lasers necessary. I forget the name for them though… maybe a type of lenticular display?

Cool use case: personalizing wayfinding signage e.g. in an airport

Bad use case: most of the rest of them

About 4 years ago I was at a VC pitch day and one of the teams rehearsing their pitch before hand was basically proposing this for augmented reality. I was mildly horrified that people saw that sort of thing as something people would want, but hey - $$$ is all that matters right? I really hope those folks never got funded.

Why do you think Meta bought VR tech and took it further? To pour ads directly into our brains. It's just that scuba sized VR tech it didn't catch on, so instead they invested in Luxottica now to make AR fashion items with the same purpose.