Facebook to augment reality with phones
Facebook this week launched a mission to make smartphone cameras windows to augmented reality, focusing on what people have in hand instead of waiting for high-tech eyewear.
While kicking off the leading social network’s annual developers conference in the heart of Silicon Valley, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg called smartphone cameras an initial and promising platform for augmented-reality features in applications tailored to synch with the social network.
“I am confident now we are going to push this augmented-reality platform forward,” Mr Zuckerberg said, predicting the technology would eventually be incorporated into eyeglasses.
“We are going to make the camera the first mainstream augmented-reality platform.”
He noted an array of things that could easily fill their roles virtually, such as game boards or television screens, with users being able to easily play or view without need for physical versions.
An upbeat Mr Zuckerberg, who fired off jokes, also showed how digital plants, animals, masks and more could be added to real scenes viewed through smartphone cameras in the same manner that games such as Pokemon Go let people catch animated creatures in the world around them.
“Augmented reality will help us mix the digital and the physical in new ways,” Mr Zuckerberg said during a keynote presentation. “We are all about extending the physical world online.”
Augmented reality tools unveiled by Facebook were impressive, but unlikely to reach the hands of users soon, according to Jackdaw Research analyst Jan Dawson.
“Facebook has been slow to get into augmented reality,” Mr Dawson said in a blog post.