Facebook CEO Vows To Make Cameras The “First Augmented Reality Platform”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told developers today that he plans to make the camera “the first augmented reality platform.”
At the company’s F8 conference, he described efforts to harness object recognition technology and GPS to provide users with information about the places they happen to be, or just have fun — for example, with the kinds of picture enhancements associated with Snapchat.
“Over time this is going to be a really important technology,” he says. He’s also encouraged that “there’s a long roadmap of technology to build” for mobile devices including “the glasses we all want.”
For example, he said that people visiting a restaurant could see what friends had to say about it, or leave messages for others.
“We see the beginning of a new platform,” he says. “We’re not using primitive tools today because we prefer primitive tools. We’re using primitive tools because we’re still early in the journey to create better ones. And in order to create better tools, we need an open platform where any developer in the world can build for augmented reality without having to build your own camera and getting a lot of people to use it….Today we’re going to start building this platform together.”
Zuckerberg acknowledged it will “take a while to roll some of these things out, and even longer for developers to start building all of these experiences.”
He added that the company is about to introduce changes to its Messenger platform. They include so-called “chat bots” that would help users to find, and communicate with, companies and celebrities.
It will also enable users to do things such as order movie tickets, call up songs on Apple Music, and play turn-by-turn games with friends.
The company unveiled a social virtual reality initiative, Facebook Spaces, that makes it possible for friends to share images to imagine themselves interacting with each other directly in different places.
Zuckerberg kicked off his address by acknowledging the “tragedy in Cleveland” where a man used Facebook to publicize a video he made of him murdering 74-year-old Robert Godwin Sr.
After saying that the company’s “our hearts go out to family and friends,” he added that “we’ll keep doing all we can to prevent tragedies like this from happening.”
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