New Nightmare Just Dropped: '3D' Animated Ads on Trucks in Traffic

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New Nightmare Just Dropped: ‘3D’ Animated Ads on Trucks in Traffic

A digital billboard company now has the technology to make 3D ads on moving trucks. Thanks, I hate it.

By Andrew P. Collins

Published

May 14, 2026 12:30 PM EDT

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A digital ad company is introducing a new feature to those trucks you might have seen with illuminated ads on their sides (also known as mobile billboards). Thanks to next-gen LED panels and supporting technologies, they can now create three-dimensional effects designed to be "indistinguishable from reality.”

I’m posting about this entirely in the hopes that someone, somewhere, who has the power to make this illegal hates it as much as I do and takes action to ban it.

If you’re not familiar with 3D billboards, they’re a thing in big city centers where aggressive buildingside advertising is basically part of the local aesthetic (places like New York City’s Times Square). Through visual trickery and forced-perspective illustrations, they create stunning visual effects, like, stuff seeming to explode beyond the billboard and into reality. This is known as anamorphic imagery. Here, this little Marvel sizzle reel of Spider-Man video game billboards shows you exactly what we’re talking about:

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 3D Billboards Around the World

Objectively, they are quite technologically impressive. Artistically, even, they’re pretty neat. And they sure are effective—it’s very difficult to walk by a billboard that appears to be popping out of the wall without being captivated by it. Which is exactly why putting them on moving vehicles sounds like an absolutely awful (and unsafe idea).

The idea of regular roads looking like Mario Kart courses with animated images floating around is kind of funny. But I can’t overstate how badly I do not want to experience products being (virtually) hurled at me at the speed of traffic while I’m trying to get around town.

I found out about this yesterday while trawling the internet and finding myself reading Sixteen Nine Powered By Invidis, a trade publication about digital signage. A company called LED Truck Media has fitted a vehicle with curved screens and light-emitting panels to bring that in-your-face anamorphic effect to the road.

“We’ve equipped this next-gen truck with ultra-high-definition LED panels that offer industry-leading brightness and color depth, ensuring 3D visuals stay vivid even in high noon sun,” Invidis quotes CEO Jonnathan Trilleras. “With a super-fine pixel pitch, a high refresh rate, and a curved-screen design, we create a much wider viewing angle that makes anamorphic content look indistinguishable from reality.”

Really? Three-dimensional ads that look like physical objects in the road? No version of that is a good idea. Somebody, please stop this.

Got a counterpoint about why these are a great idea? You can send me an email at andrew.collins@thedrive.com, but I can’t promise I’ll read it.

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