Zuckerberg Confirms FB Has Plans For Augmented Reality

Facebook eyes to explore augmented reality in the future, confirmed the social media giant’s co-founder Mark Zuckerberg at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit.

According to Zuckerberg, he confirms that the company is working on the technology, but also admits that it is a bit farther out.

Facebook bought Oculus, the virtual reality startup, for a whooping $2 billion in 2014.

While the virtual reality (VR) based innovations will be able to offer immersive entertainment experiences, augmented reality (AR) can lead to development of practical applications which can be applicable in the real world.

Facebook’s CEO said virtual reality is the next major computing trend but added it will take time to catch on with consumers just like smartphones and tablets took a decade. He explains, “It’s kind of seamless”.

In a sense, while VR carries the risk of having users disconnect from the world by diving into a totally different reality, AR aims to improve their’ experience of the world and help them connect with it better. There is no doubt that numerous leading tech companies are looking forward to VR and augmented reality taking shape. For AR, it’s harder.

According to Abrash, he was quoted as saying, “Augmented reality will be here but it’s a long road to get there”. Could Facebook have a similar partnership in mind for its augmented reality solution?

“Certainly this more immersive content will be an increasing portion of what gets shared. [But there will be] use cases where you can be in person with someone, doing surgery remotely, that you very much need to be synchronous”.

You could walk down the street and see how many likes a business has, or how many people signed up for an event. But another part of the beauty of Internet communication is it’s asynchronous.

As anyone with a 3DS knows, the technology is not new.

So while Zuck and Abrash gave few details on exactly how Facebook’s AR dreams will be delivered, the mere confirmation that it’s looking beyond VR is important. Zuckerberg sees wide-ranging use of AR, when combined with facial recognition. “If you want to select something, you should be able to look at it”.