At the moment augmented reality is still a clunky, phone-in-front-of-your-face experience, but today Facebook promised to transform that experience when it announced a new AR platform. And you can be sure that quite a few folks at Apple were watching with great interest the live stream of the F8 developers conference in San Jose, California, where the new platform was introduced with plenty of striking visual aids.
Onstage at the conference, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and some of his top aides energetically kicked off what is sure to be a new platform war—one that will soon be joined by Apple and plenty of other competitors.
“This space will get crowded though, and I expect both Apple and Google to also bring these functionalities to their camera apps and offer developers the chance to build AR experiences on their platforms as well,” Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin told Fast Company in an email.
Facebook made a strategic decision to be the first tech giant to launch an AR platform when the hardware and technology is still in its nascent stage. In Facebook’s version of AR, a user will hold their phone in front of their face and watch as all kinds of moving imagery and information is superimposed over the picture of the real world seen by the camera. Yep, kinda like Pokémon Go.
Facebook said it will provide developers with precise location, object recognition, and 3D effects tools they need to start building their own custom AR experiences. That could mean anything from AR games to a retailer placing a data card over a product in front of the camera.
“Facebook is smart to give developers the tools to build AR experiences and give those tools to a wider developer community,” Bajarin says. “They are approaching this as a true platform play, which is smart.”
It seems likely that Apple will have to weigh in with its own AR platform sooner or later—I’m guessing sooner. Two media outlets have already reported that Apple is working on prototypes of some kind of AR glasses. This is unsurprising; the company has likely been working on glasses for a couple of years. The press reports say the company already has “hundreds” of engineers working on its own AR effort.
Apple isn’t known for being first in emerging technologies, preferring to hang back…