Augmented reality has the potential to change how we interact with the internet; as these technologies scale, you can certainly bet that Facebook is going to be looking to shape what’s possible.
At our one-day TC Sessions: AR/VR event in LA next month, we’ll be joined by Ficus Kirkpatrick, Facebook’s head of Camera AR Platform, to chat about the company’s strategies in 2018 and beyond for augmented reality.
While the bulk of Facebook’s VR ambitions have taken up residence under the Oculus name, the biggest AR platform available right now are the hundreds of millions of smartphones that people already have. Fortunately, Facebook has quite the presence on mobile, but that’s made it even more of a challenge to fit AR ambitions into apps that already have so much going on.
Facebook is not the place most people turn to when they want to take a photo, but the company’s Camera team is hoping to change that by bringing augmented reality face and environment filters deeper into the app.
The Camera Effects AR Platform was Mark Zuckerberg’s hallmark announcement at F8 in 2017, a year when Apple and Google also started getting more verbose in their praise for AR’s potential. In 2018, the company has had some other things keeping it busy, but has continued to bring AR to other areas of the company’s suite of apps with new capabilities.
Right now Facebook is largely focused on the fun and artsy applications of AR, but where will the company take smartphone AR beyond selfie filters toward delivering utility to billions of users? We look forward to chatting with Kirkpatrick about the challenges ahead for the tech giant and the strategies for getting more users to warm up to AR.
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