Correction: The pitch competition won by Aireal was hosted by the Dallas FortWork coworking space, not by the Dallas Startup Week event itself.

On one of his frequent drives from Dallas to Austin, Texas, Kevin Hart spotted a billboard that he despised. Its garish, miss-matched letters spelled out something along the lines of “Does advertising work? Just did!” with a phone number, presumably for advertisers to rent the billboard space.

“I saw it every time I went to Austin, and I hated it,” Hart told me. “I found myself thinking, ‘Is this the best user experience advertising has to offer?'”

While most people might grumble about the obnoxious sign and move on with their lives, Hart set out to develop a better alternative to static, boring billboards by creating Aireal, a tech startup specializing in the new medium of augmented reality.

Aireal is similar in concept to other AR programs like Aurasma, but rather than using image recognition or QR codes to track and display content, Aireal uses geospatial coordinates. I asked Hart what sorts benefits a location-based system had over an image-based system, and he explained that image displays are too limited.

“Image recognition is an either-or system,” he said. “Either the program picks up the image, or it doesn’t. If it’s partially obscured or covered by a reflection, the augmented reality program won’t work.”

Advertisers and other content makers who want to display material with Aireal can do so by purchasing “Airspace” based on location and size. The Airspace owner can then drop its content into that space to be seen by anyone with a mobile or wearable device. As viewers move in relation to the virtual objects, the display changes just as if they existed in the real world. They can even become partially or fully obscured by buildings.

Aireal recently won the pitch prize at the first annual Dallas Startup Week, winning $2,000 and a 3-month membership at a local coworking space. Last weekend at SXSW Interactive, the team demonstrated its AR with a giant virtual drone that hovered high above the event (somewhere just below Grumpy Cat altitude).

Getting our day started at #SXSWInteractive! See you out there! pic.twitter.com/YmwVcuFQWt

— Aireal (@airealtech) March 14, 2015

As with real ad space, Hart explains that the cost of Airspace varies based on size, visibility, and traffic. So a multi-story block hovering above Times Square would cost significantly more than a billboard-sized space on an interstate in central Texas.

While advertising was the initial focus of Aireal, Hart points out that there are hundreds of other potential uses for the technology, such as displaying play-by-play information at sporting events, real estate details when looking at buildings, and even real world video games played on the front lawn or in a park.

Hart admits that wearable AR technology, such as Microsoft’s HoloLens visor, is still years away from being widely adopted, which is why Aireal is also supporting AR on mobile devices. “We already understand how mobile devices work and how people use them,” Hart said. “But AR is a new field with a lot of room for experimentation and new ideas.”

As for the obnoxious billboard that inspired the creation of Aireal, Hart showed me a recent photo he took on his way to SXSW last weekend. “It’s still there!”

Image credit: Aireal (c) via Twitter