APPENDIX 2
on one-to-one
personalisation
Although OOH is still not allowing advertisers to communicate on a one-to-one level, perhaps one day we will be able to see outdoor adverts which are exclusively personalised to us. In this space you will read of some recent technological developments that are leading towards this direction:
Parallel Reality Screens & Smart Glasses.
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Parallel Reality Screens
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These special screens are under development by Delta Airlines in partnership with Misapplied Sciences and "they leverage on multi-view pixels & proprietary technology, enabling customers to see personalized, in-language messages – tailored just to them – as they walk past the digital screen" (Delta News Hub, 2020, n.p.).
Specifically, these displays "can simultaneously project up to millions of light rays of different colors and brightness. Each ray can then be software-directed to a specific person" (Misapplied Sciences, 2020, n.p.).
At present time, they are exclusively tested in airports: customers have to first scan their boarding pass on the boarding pass scanner and select the language they want to use on the screen. Later on, as their journey at the airport continues, they will be able to see messages which are tailored just to them (Delta News Hub, 2020, n.p.).
If these become successful, in the future they could potentially set revolutionary transformations in advertising.
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Smart Glasses
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Since they already exist, wearables are one of the most plausible options to see the prototypes happening in real life, and they also allow to quickly merge the synthetic within the real world. Multiple types of wearables could be used in this context, but I particularly would like to focus on AR glasses, due to their ability to add digital layers in our physical world in a matter of few seconds.
It is a good sign that many companies already showed an interest to build a presence in the smart glasses market, such as Snap, which recently launched its new model of Spectales.
Quite similar to Snap’s Spectacles, there are Meta's first generation of smart glasses, Ray-ban Stories, which have been built in partnership with Ray-Ban. Their core ability is to take photos and videos, but compared to Snap's glasses, Ray-Ban Stories also "feature open-ear speakers to listen, and a three-microphone audio array to deliver rich voice and sound transmission for calls and videos" (Hern, 2021, n.p.).