USA TODAY International Edition
Facebook and augmented reality
On tap for the developer conference: How augmented reality may change how you use Facebook sooner than you think.
On Tuesday, Facebook wants to augment your reality.
That’s when the giant social network hosts its annual F8 conference for software developers, a geeky affair that nevertheless has real- world implications for everyday Facebook users.
Last year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Facebook’s 10- year road map that calls for powerful technologies to radically alter how people connect with friends and family and the world at large.
Here’s the future according to Facebook: The smartphone camera is on the verge of taking augmented- reality mainstream, changing how people use Facebook, how they interact with each other and how they interact with the world.
Think Pokemon Go but on steroids. We will wander not one, but two worlds — the physical and the digital — wearing glasses or contact lenses that can sum- mon information about the street we are walking on or the restaurant we are eating in or let us manipulate digital objects that feel real but aren’t really there.
The augmented- reality lenses that Facebook is building to deliver that hybrid experience are still years in the offing. But smartphones are already in our pockets and Facebook believes they can start delivering experiences that mix the digital with the physical much sooner than we think.
“We are clearly in a visual world. It’s interesting to think about all of the things we do with our eyes and why our phones don’t help us do more of this on camera. Recognizing whether we are in the right place, seeing people around us, capturing memories without having to make a lot of effort to take a photo,” says Josh Elman, a partner with Greylock who worked for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter before becoming a venture capitalist. “Facebook knows this and it’s going hard.”
For the moment, the augmented- reality tricks we can do with smartphones are fairly primitive, technically speaking. For instance: Facebook’s camera effects that jazz up selfies with silly or whimsical masks, frames and filters.
But Facebook isn’t just in the business of helping people take “cool selfies,” says Gartner analyst Brian Blau. It’s focused on creating experiences that will fundamentally change how people interact with each other and the physical world.
“We are just seeing the beginning of the sophistication of smartphones and how they relate to the user and how the user can use them in mixed and augmented reality scenarios,” Blau says.
Picture what could happen if the collective brainpower of thousands of software developers from around the globe were unleashed to dream up all kinds of new augmented reality experiences.
On Tuesday, Facebook is expected to hand them that opportunity by opening up the camera effects platform to software developers. It’s also likely to show off new augmented- reality experiences it has created and those being created by a select group of outside developers.
“The more outside developers work with Facebook, the more powerful the company becomes without having to employ more engineers or buy more companies,” says Steven Levy, editor of tech industry news service Backchannel.
One way to lure developers is with F8, an annual rite designed to dazzle, this year more than ever. Facebook has relocated from smaller conference quarters in San Francisco to the convention center in San Jose.
And, just like last year’s F8 when Facebook trumpeted opening up Messenger to developers creating chat bots, it has surprises in store over two days, analysts say.
From the livestreamed event, expect advances in how virtual reality can become truly social, beyond playing games or taking selfies in 360- degree recreations of real places, and updates to Facebook Messenger.
On the second day of the conference, Facebook will tease futuristic gadgets, some of which are being cooked up in a secretive lab called Building 8 run by former Google executive Regina Dugan. Building 8 has been stocking up on experts in consumer electronics, neuroscience, and robotics and computer vision.