Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook users to catch the Augmented Reality wave. He explored ways he wants to take social media into the Augmented Reality (AR) space at Facebook’s annual F8 conference. He showed off Facebook tools for AR that are currently under development, and hopes to integrate them into the social media experience.
He showed how essential social interactions could occur through AR, and how it would expand people’s usage of Facebook.
“So these are three of the technological building blocks for building augmented reality: precise location, 3D effects and object recognition. But now that we’ve gone through some of the technology, let’s take a look at some of the use cases that you’re going to be able to build and do. So let’s start with the most basic. This is an AR tool that Nike created for helping you visualize and share your runs in some fun new ways,” said Zuckerberg.
He went on to explore other tools for AR interactions, and showed videos demonstrating social interactions between friends and family that played out over Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality headsets.
AR has been around for years, but has yet to fully embed itself into the mainstream. From video games like Pokemon Go and online communities like Second Life, AR has seen success, but it has never fully taken off on social media. Zuckerberg hopes to change that in the next few years.
