Come One! Come All! Watch As The Amazing Billboard Reads Your Mind!

[tropton13]

Ever feel like somebody's watching you?  Well tourist, residents, and motors around London's famous Piccadilly Circus sure seem to think so.  The new and improved billboard at the iconic London square measures 790 sq meters, 11 million pixels spaced 8mm apart.  This massive screen can display 281 trillion different colors on an expanse of about 4 tennis courts and is the largest screen of its type in Europe.  However, its gargantuan size is only half the story!

 

Original article from The Verge - https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/16/16468452/screen-london-picadilly-circus-cars-targeted-ads-landsec

 

The screens owners, Landsec, says that hidden cameras will analyze the make, model, and color of passing cars, as well as the age, gender, and feelings? of pedestrians passing by.  The information captured will be used to tailor advertisements towards those in close proximity to the billboard.  The screen will also display ads depending on the weather and news and sports event.  

 

A spokesmen from Landsec stated in an email that "the screen can react to these external factors, but would do so without collecting or storing any personal details."

 

The screen will display 6 different section displaying ads, news, sports, weather, etc and a full screen ad using the entire screen for 30 seconds every 10 minutes - the first brands to debut will include Samsung, Coca-Cola, Hyundai, and L'Oreal.

 

Landsec has not announced when the the new board will be switched on, as they do not want the screen to cause overcrowding and traffic issue on an already congested sidewalk and city street.

[AlTech]

I need to make a mental note to never visit picadilly so that I can avoid that nasty screen......

[tropton13]

4 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

I need to make a mental note to never visit picadilly so that I can avoid that nasty screen......

So, help my American spelling...is it Piccadilly or Picadilly?  I want to get it right.

[AlTech]

Just now, tropton13 said:

So, help my American spelling...is it Piccadilly or Picadilly?  I want to get it right.

I don't know. I don't live in London ....

[ARikozuM]

Mazda will never be seen... 

Toyota/Lexus will be confused for Hondas...

And Chevrolet will look like all of the above...

 

How can this not go wrong? 

[ARikozuM]

1 minute ago, tropton13 said:

So, help my American spelling...is it Piccadilly or Picadilly?  I want to get it right.

It's a location, so spelling conventions don't matter. Google says Piccadilly.

[PlayStation 2]

Might not want to do that :^)

[tropton13]

10 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

It's a location, so spelling conventions don't matter. Google says Piccadilly.

Yeah,  I'm not stressing that hard over it

[samcool55]

So we are all going to drive cars like this in the future?

If you guys are wondering why, it's REALLY difficult for camera's to focus on this car and to figure out what's the shape of the car.

That way they won't really know what you drive so the system would be quite broken

 

And don't worry about it becoming illegal, it's a big deal for car companies and actually more cars with such design would actually help them

[mariushm]

Would probably be easier to just put a bunch of infrared leds on the car which would mess up with the cameras in the billboards. Your car would show up as a blob of light and that's pretty much it. Add some strobing effect to the infrared leds and you really have fun with them.

[samcool55]

55 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Mazda will never be seen... 

Toyota/Lexus will be confused for Hondas...

And Chevrolet will look like all of the above...

 

How can this not go wrong? 

What about vans? They will basically appear like a fancy cube, also busses and other commercial vehicles will basically be worthless for the system because they don't know who is on it (yet ) But i guess in the case of a bus they would just show an ad of a cheap store or something...