AUGMENTED REALITY
INSIDE MARK ZUCKERBERG’S VISION FOR YOUR FACEBOOK
CEO says Facebook is poised to catapult AR into mainstream
Mark Zuckerberg is sitting ramrod straight on the edge of a gray couch, sketching a vision of what Facebook will soon be like for its nearly 2 billion users.
A blank wall turns into a 3-D art display with an animated, infinite rainbow waterfall — just by holding up a smartphone and viewing it through the camera.
That future is now. This Millennial-inspired wall canvas is just a short distance from where the Facebook CEO is discussing his company’s new camera platform before it opened up to software developers at the company’s annual conference Tuesday.
“There are groups of people just staring and admiring this wall, which looks blank,” Zuckerberg told USA TODAY from his glass-walled conference room at the heart of Facebook’s sprawling campus here.
“That’s going to be a thing in the future, all of this art all over the place. I think it’s really neat,” he said.
“We even put a plaque up on the wall to commemorate it. It’s one of the first pieces of augmented reality street art in the world.”
The world’s most populous social network is poised to create a generation of new apps that it’s betting will catapult augmented reality into the mainstream, the same way it made personal status updates and viral mobile games part of the daily, unthinking habits of billions.
Fans of multiplayer video game Mass Effect: Andromeda can don a Mass Effect- themed helmet mask effect for use with the front camera, then flip the camera to view stats from your latest mission using data from the game — basically a dynamic leader board in a 3-D space. You can also pan your phone to experience game visuals that augment the world around, bringing the scene from the game to life.
Soon fans will cheer on soccer team Manchester United with real-time data and video from the match.
When ManU scores, it shows up in Facebook as a big flashing “GOALLLL” as you hear the roar of the crowd and confetti flies.
Zuckerberg, 32, is in the zone, describing this very near future that is deeply entwined with his view of how communication is evolving, from text to photo to video and now, digitally altered
physical reality — all via the Facebook app on your smartphone.
Facebook has poured billions of dollars into artificial intelligence research and virtual reality development, including its $3 billion acquisition of pioneering virtual reality headset maker Oculus. Yet virtual reality hasn’t really taken off yet, partially hobbled by the bulkiness of headsets and the expense of computing gear, as well as people’s general unfamiliarity with it.
Along the way, Facebook came to a simple realization. “A lot of the use cases for augmented reality people have started to do on phones and cameras,” Zuckerberg says.
So far augmented reality on smartphones has been pretty primitive: mostly silly or entertaining masks, filters and frames. Rival Snapchat and last year’s hit game Pokémon Go have been the closest to ushering in the augmented reality age.
But those uses are rudimentary compared to Zuckerberg ’s ambitions. And Facebook’s reach is far bigger than either app.
“People aren’t using primitive tools because they prefer primitive tools. They are using primitive tools because we are still early in the journey in developing better tools,” Zuckerberg says.
Soon, Zuckerberg says, everyday life will get an augmented reality jolt in three ways: by using the Facebook camera to display information in the real world, add digital objects in it and enhance existing objects.
Picture trying to keep your children entertained at the doctor’s office. Instead of dragging along a bag of toys, Zuckerberg says kids will play augmented reality games with smartphones, using the waiting room table as the game board.
No need to carve your initials in the bark of that old tree or in the table of your favorite dive bar, soon you will be able to do that digitally. Same for leaving a note for your spouse or kids on the refrigerator. That, too, can now be digitally rendered.
One of Zuckerberg ’s favorite new augmented reality experiences was built by Nike. The Facebook CEO, whose personal goal last year was to run 365 miles, says the Nike+ Run Club augmented reality app will overlay information around you as you run and share your run with friends. It also features lighthearted effects, such as putting you in a headband and drenching you in cartoon sweat. “It’s cute,” Zuckerberg says. But it’s not just a gimmick. True to Facebook’s origin as a way to connect with classmates, Zuckerberg sees this augmented reality as a way to make online relationships more real and reallife relationships better.
“The idea is that when you become friends with someone on Facebook, your relationship gets stronger in real life. You bring your community online and your physical community gets stronger,” Zuckerberg says. “So it’s not one or the other, you can actually mix these two together. And what augmented reality is like in a lot of ways is the platonic form of being able to mix digital and virtual reality.”
To fuse these two realities, Zuckerberg envisions one day wearing natural-feeling, lightweight glasses or contact lenses that overlay all kinds of digital content and information on the physical world. “If you want to play chess, great, here’s a chess board,” says Zuckerberg, pantomiming placing a chess board between us on his conference room coffee table. “You have your glasses and I have mine. And even though it’s not a real board, we can play and it feels like it’s real.”