it’s like that scene in Wall-e

I stopped by a Shell station on my way home for gas (as luck would have it, the gas guzzling Acura requires premium only) and had just done the whole credit card, zip code thing when the previously silent screen above me suddenly greeted me. To be honest, I mostly ignored it until I heard someone else’s screen greet them. At that point, I thought about Wall-e.

There’s a scene in Wall-e where he’s wheeling himself home, and every time he passes by a screen it suddenly flickers to life and spouts some advertisement. This benign greeting at Shell is a taste of what’s to come, I’m sure. Wall-e like advertisements with proximity sensors are the future billboards of tomorrow. Perhaps they’ll rely on solar or wind energy to keep themselves fully charged, with some sort of light sensor to alter volume controls. Silence will be a thing of the past.

Hacking these ads will be the next generation of graffiti…