The giant feline hung suspended over Tokyo’s Shinjuku train station last summer. It stretched awake in the morning, meowed at passersby during rush hour and curled into a sleepy ball after midnight.

The cat, along with a cresting ocean wave above the streets of Seoul, weren’t biology experiments gone awry. They were 3D anamorphic outdoor ads, proofs-of-concept from several forward-thinking Asian firms. The pieces would inspire designers at U.K. ad company Ocean Outdoor – which owns many public screens – to create the tools for a separate 3D ad platform as part of a new division called DeepScreen. Part art installation, part-“1984″-esque vision, the results hint at what our commercialized outdoors might soon look like.

DeepScreen and Ocean’s Piccadilly Circus location along with others across Europe have in just a few months attracted advertisers that included Fortnite, Netflix, Vodafone (in that ad, 25-foot rugby stars and their ball burst through a building), Sony, Amazon’s Prime Video (for its new “Wheel of Time” fantasy series) and food-service company Deliveroo.

Two weeks ago, the British agency that worked on the “Wheel of Time” spot, Amplify, brought it to Times Square. (Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos owns The Washington Post.) In that ad, actress Rosamund Pike, whose character Moiraine represents what the series imagines as “the light,” reaches out her hand, beckoning for help. The Fade, an agent of “the darkness,” reaches out his mouth, looking for a city-bus to devour. The effect, which can give passersby the impulse to duck, is a leap ahead of the area’s famous steaming cup of soup.

For anyone who has thought that what would spice up sidewalk life is gargantuan branded figures, this innovation is for you. Should it go wide, the anamorphic trend could augur a new moment of full-bodied action on the nation’s streets, of spinning tacos and flying whiskey bottles, all doing to the flat-screen digital billboard what color TV did to that old RCA.

The trend could make advertising more dynamic and fun, giving us giant digital playspaces anytime we step outside. “When you literally have things popping out of a billboard at you, it feels inviting in all kinds of new ways,” said Greg Coleman, Prime Video’s global head of marketing & franchise.

It could also turn our public commons into obtrusive brand exercises, making advertising literally something we can’t avoid. Anyone who has ever endured a too-popular meme knows it’s a short jump from virality to annoyance.

“This is exciting and it’s attention-getting,” Arun Lakshmanan, associate professor of marketing in the University at Buffalo School of Management and an expert in immersive advertising. “It also could really start getting intrusive.”

One of the first known billboards was hung in the U.S. in the 1830s, and it advertised, fittingly, a circus. Painted roadside billboards proliferated in the 1920s as Americans bought cars, and brands from Camel to Coca-Cola wanted to reach them.

Digital billboards caught on this century thanks to outdoor giants like JCDecaux and Clear Channel Outdoor; the form allowed for quick pivots and ad rotations. While it seems like the stuff of an earlier era, the outdoor-ad business has held steady ($8.1 billion in the U.S., down slightly from its recent high of $9 billion, but up 6 percent over lockdown-heavy 2020). The form offers an advantage: With so much ad-skipping technology on other platforms, outside is one of the last places consumers can’t switch off.

Now comes anamorphic. It works via “forced perspective” – the idea that flat images can be manipulated to appear dimensional from certain vantage points. While the fundamentals are centuries-old, very bright and bendable high-definition screens with ultra-quick microprocessors make the illusions newly convincing.

Production is expensive – it can cost upwards of $500,000, several times a 30-second TV spot – and labor intensive. Where many 30-second spots can be completed in a few weeks, the “Wheel” activation took three months to produce, between development, a green-screen shoot, advanced VFX and customization for each city. (The “sweet spot” of where to beam differs in every location.)

“Everything with anthropomorphic needs to be thought about in an extremely detailed way,” said Jeavon Smith, chief creative officer at Amplify, which last year helped inaugurate anamorphic with a PS5 spot.

Anamorphic supporters make a straightforward argument. Pedestrians these days have their heads buried in their phones and, maybe soon, AR glasses. A little razzle is needed to get their attention.

“And what’s great is this isn’t a technology for consumers; you don’t need special eyewear,” said Susann Jarry, a spokeswoman for Ocean. She cited internal company research showing 3D displays produced passerby recall at 2.5 times the rate of flat-screen ads.

Jarry said it also appeals to advertisers as consumers (for now) pour back into public life. While we were holed up binging television, it turns out, ad agencies were tele-meeting on the best ways to gobsmack us when we emerged.

The elephant in the Zoom is personalization. If handled carefully – very carefully – these slick new screen ads don’t have to be pre-planned; they could change based on what a sensor picks up from passersby. A group of young women could prompt an ad for a youth-clothing brand; A trickle of electric vehicles might mean an environmentally themed placement. Ocean is already toying with this, Jarry said (it doesn’t collect personal data, she said). Digital-outdoor ads could offer a more lifelike version of what already hits us daily on search and social media.

Ocean, Amplify and others are part of a movement of sorts to prioritize storytelling and experiences; it has much in common with traditional digital advertising as WhatsApp does to air mail. It’s a philosophy that wants to turn buildings blue and the world neon, where the line between public space and brand messaging has been erased, preferably replaced by a swoosh.

Because anamorphic requires a certain viewing angle, it contains an odd contradiction: it may actually play better in curated online environments, where video taken at the best angle can be chosen and displayed. It’s an old-school show for the Instagram age.

“The brands actually don’t mind that,” said Thales Texeira, a former Harvard Business School professor and co-founder of digital consultancy decoupling. “Even a high-traffic area like Times Square only sees a certain number of people every day. But if you go viral you can be seen by millions.”

The problem with marketing is that it can be self-cannibalizing. Every innovation is quickly copycatted, suddenly making it seem a lot less innovative.

“That’s why these spots need to tell a good story on their own,” said Jacqueline Babb, a veteran marketer who is now a senior lecturer at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. “The media itself can’t be the story.”

Nir Eyal, an author and expert on the attention economy, called this in an email the “shiny pony” problem. New forms of advertising lose their luster. Customers could lose interest.

But these ads may not be aimed only at them. Texeira notes the appearance of innovation could be equally important for what it telegraphs to investors, retailers and competitors.

Even the skeptical would admit there’s something cool about dynamic images occupying the space around us. But is it scary in the hands of corporations? Could advertising get “Minority Reported” where we are all Tom Cruise, assaulted by airborne ads tailored to us every time we leave our homes?

Could a political demagogue even use the tech to loom large in public?

“How we want to regulate this is a very good question,” said Buffalo’s Lakshmanan. “Unfortunately, in the history of advertising, it tends to be answered only after something has gotten popular.”