The same technology that made Pokemon Go so successful has a central role in the social network’s vision for the future.
There are parts of your life Facebook hasn’t yet invaded. But it’s coming.
The social networking giant is creating a new type of app designed to overlay images from a computer onto the real world. Hold up your phone, turn on its camera, and it’ll be able to add virtual signs or art, or even games where there was none before.
The technology is called augmented reality, and Facebook says it’s the next step in changing the way we interact with computers. In the future, we’ll use this technology to watch television on blank walls or see furniture laid out in an empty room.
But for now, it’ll look like cheesy graphics for our cameras. Just finished a run? You can take a photo with a virtual headband, map and sweat coming off your forehead. Waiting in a doctor’s office? Clear off the table and start up a game you see when holding up your phone.
“We’re all about extending the physical world online,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday at his company’s annual conference for software developers. “Augmented reality is going to help us mix the digital and physical in new ways. ”
Zuckerberg sees this as the first in a series of steps toward a future in which items like glasses or contact lenses will become windows into a computerized world, where all sorts of information is available without the need to look at a screen or pull out a phone.
Facebook shows new augmented-reality tools that let developers create apps.
Whether it’s Facebook that ultimately makes this world possible is still an open question. It marks a new initiative for the company as it comes to grips with its place as one of the world’s largest companies, with nearly 2 billion people — more than half the world’s online population — logging on at least once a month.
So far, that influence has allowed it to become home to political dissidents, protest movements, community groups and artists. But the company has also faced controversy, such as the rise of fake news stories, which were shared and discussed so much that politicians began arguing Facebook had inadvertently tipped the scales of the US presidential election last year.
There have also been the profound reverberations of Facebook Live, which has been used to broadcast murder , rape and torture live to people’s news feeds.
