Facebook Eyes Augmented Reality

According to Zuckerberg, he confirms that the company is working on the technology, but also admits that it is a bit farther out. The Oculus’ Chief Scientist Michael Abrash said that Virtual Reality is already “past the knee of the curve”, and it is here. Virtual reality is the technology used to stimulate an environment with physical presences in a visualized real or imaginary world, displayed to the user. Common sense would tell us that augmented reality would indeed be a computing asset that would augment social media encounters into a more exciting level, without taking us out from the real world.

The technology is by no means new, as anyone with a 3DS can attest to, but it has gained more notoriety in the last few months thanks largely to Microsoft’s HoloLens, its own Windows 10 augmented reality solution.

Company’s officials said that the organization is looking into creating its own AR technological approach, although they did not offer any additional information about what kind of device we can anticipate, because it is still in its infant phase.

If it would work well, Abrash reckons that would be something everyone would use. The tech, which overlays virtual content onto what you see ahead of you, poses different challenges than VR, which transports you to a different world entirely. There are a whole host of challenges – how you do the optics and displays and get photos onto the eyes, how you have something that’s socially acceptable and comfortable all day.

Augmented reality differ from virtual reality in that virtual reality tends to be wholly immersive, essentially helps the user shut out the rest of the world and focus only on the experience. Maybe it’ll be contacts (or glasses). The implications for a Facebook-driven AR system are pretty obvious. For example, think about driving past a cafe down the road and you can see the number of likes the respective cafe now gathered on its Facebook official page. Its facial cognizance mixed with AR might have vast-ranging use cases. Imagine walking around the city and being shown notifications and other important details a person needs on a daily basis, for which he needs to awkwardly reach for his phone in the pocket every other minute. Zuckerberg maintains that VR allows Facebook users to share anything in any form of medium.