Boston.com- Interactive advertising: A good thing?

All one needs to do now is combine this with a little biometric analysis (retinal scanning perhaps?), as in the article about the Shell pay for gas with your fingerprints while you watch advertisements at the pump (the article, which I mentioned awhile back indicates a trend towards that type of thing) or perhaps a little celldar (Jabberwocky, anyone?), toss in the 336 billion bits of internet information (per month) which the top five harvest and I have a feeling you’ll be seeing some HIGHLY interactive advertisements pretty soon. Interactive advertising: A good thing?

Welcome to the spooky new world of gesture recognition. The field pioneered by scientists for tracking the elderly and potential terrorists is also churning out interactive displays for trade shows and hotel lobbies. Soon, a large advertising display will detect your round-shouldered frame several yards away, and offer you a coupon for a caffeinated pick-me-up. (That, or the display will see that you are about to take a swing at it, and call the cops.)

Samsung displays, which you can interact with up to 15 feet away, will turn up in hotels in major US cities later this year.

The immersive advertising setups, created by Samsung and Reactrix, become more intensely interactive as consumers draw closer. I’ll be running the other way.

ETA- if you need more, The Kassandra Project writes about 3 new articles which deal with privacy/surveillance issues which have come out in the last couple of days. Also, read up on Credit Card 2.0 (“Tap N Go” and/or “PayPass”)- RFID chipped credit cards.

Tags: privacy, data mining, datamining, Big Brother, targeted advertising, RFID, Panopticon, celldar, interactive advertisements, Minority Report, biometrics, retinal scanning