I’ve spent the last six weeks or so augmenting over as many different advertising images in Brisbane that I could find, which has been heaps of fun to do. It’s interesting once you get in the mindset of looking at advertising everywhere you go: some of it just makes no sense whatsoever, some of it is just really bad, and plenty of ads just fall back on the ‘put a pretty face on it for no reason’ approach. Perfect targets for augmented reality activism.

I’m actually pretty happy with how these have turned out. Campaigns about body image and media literacy usually incorporate traditional media like brochures, workbooks, posters, and websites. This is all fine, but quite removed and abstract. I think the most successful aspect of the augmented reality approach is it moves the site of the information and directly disrupts the viewers perceptions of what they see in front of them. One of the side effects that I didn’t expect is the impact that it has had on me: some ads you just look at and wonder, ‘who signed off on this?’. They just seem so ridiculous to me now.

You can see some more example here: nobodiesperfekt.com