Last year Burt's Bees created an interactive billboard featuring thousands of tear-off product coupons to promote a new line of hydration cream. Originally placed in Minneapolis, the billboard has since been donated to the urban gardening students at Durham School of the Arts in North Carolina. Repurposed as a rain catching system, the billboard captures more than 6,300 gallons of rain water each year for use in the school's community garden.
Eventually we'll get to SF-quality hard AR, but it'll take a while. I'd be surprised if it was sooner than five years, and it could easily be more than ten before it makes it into consumer products. That's fine; there are tons of interesting things to do and plenty of technical challenges to figure out just with soft AR. I wrote one of the first PC games with bitmapped graphics in 1982, and 30 years later we're still refining the state of the art; a few years or even a decade is just part of the maturing process for a new technology. So sit back and enjoy the show as AR grows, piece by piece, into truly seamless augmented reality over the years. It won't be a straight shot to Rainbow's End, but we'll get there - and I have no doubt that it'll be a fun ride all along the way.
This is an interactive display exhibited at the OFFF Conference. The display showed a live video feed of conference attendees, and those viewing the display were able to add digital graffiti such as costumes, funny faces, etc., to the video feed. This could be a good tech to look into for Cartoon Network.