Augmented reality is the technology of the future. In theory, it’s a simple idea that looks for ways of enhancing our everyday reality with digital technology, adding layers of software onto the real world. Google took a stab at it a while ago with the Google Glasses – aka the world’s biggest flop – and now Facebook wants to give it a shot.
As technology progresses we’ve become acquainted with some basic and rudimentary forms of AR, via Snapchat and mobile games like Pokemon Go. Every time our smartphone camera manipulates our face or our environment through filters and animations, we’re getting closer and closer to more complex shapes of AR, and we’re also learning to understand it and use it.
Mark Zuckerberg, in his own words, on why AR is Facebook’s next big platform bet https://t.co/ckdgzx6L2E pic.twitter.com/uutwgE40P8
— Recode (@Recode) April 18, 2017
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Zuckerberg wants to develop a software that will be able to manipulate reality in a variety of ways, allowing you to take a picture of your cereal and edit in some cute little sharks or allowing you to replace real objects with digital information.
“Think about how many of the things around us don’t actually need to be physical. Instead of a $500 TV sitting in front of us, what’s to keep us from one day having it be a $1 app?”
While all of this sounds incredible in theory, at the moment there’s no technology that suggests that this will be happening any time soon. Facebook also doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to groundbreaking technology. They do own a lot of social media – Instagram, WhatsApp – but they’ve also invested millions of dollars in projects that have flopped.
For now, the new Facebook Camera will allow you to edit things in and out of pictures easier than ever before, like a super powered photoshop that will garner a lot of fans from all over social media.
Facebook has partnered up with a number of companies that have agreed to start developing different softwares that will form an ecosystem with Facebook (kind of like what Apple did with iTunes and iPhones) that’ll allow AR to become a reality. Hopefully, this technology will lead to awesome things like being able to watch TV without any hardware, instead of simply editing ourselves into the Coachella concert we couldn’t go to. Time will tell.
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