Ads in user-uploaded videos – new work from Stanford

Those smarty-smart smart people at Stanford (which gave us Sergey and Larry, Sun, and, ahem, Jerry) have developed some software to make it possible to insert dynamic images or videos inside the environment of another video. I’m not talking about pre-rolls, post-rolls or overlays here; the inserted images/movies (which could of course be ads) are rendered as if they appeared on the surfaces within the “host” movie. You’ll get the idea when you watch this video:

This is pretty clever stuff – akin to what our in-game advertising subsidiary, Massive, does in Xbox 360 games; except with Massive, the in-game geometry is already known, whereas this software figures it out. Now all they need to do is to make the regions clickable, and they’ve got a startup company, right there. Will be snapped up by YouTube before you even finish reading this sentence.

You can try the technology for yourself, called ZunaVision, here (sample videos and images are a bit lame, mind).