Mark Zuckerberg Sees Augmented Reality Ecosystem in Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg Sees Augmented Reality Ecosystem in
Facebook
By MIKE ISAAC APRIL 18, 2017
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Facebook’s chief executive, Mark
Zuckerberg, has long rued the day that Apple and Google beat him to building
smartphones, which now underpin many people’s digital lives. Ever since, he has
searched for modern computing’s next frontier and how to be a part of it from
the start.
Now, Mr. Zuckerberg is betting he has found it: the real
world.
On Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg introduced what he positioned
as the first mainstream augmented reality platform, a way for people to view
and digitally manipulate the physical world around them through the lens of
their smartphone cameras.
What that means today is fairly limited. Augmented
reality is nascent — people can add simple flourishes on top of their photos or
videos, like sticking a pixelated blue beard on a selfie, or adding puppy dog
stickers in the front yard of a photo of their house.
But in Mr. Zuckerberg’s telling, there are few boundaries
for how this technology would evolve. He said he envisioned a world in which
people can eventually point smartphone cameras at a bowl of cereal and have an
app create tiny sharks swimming in the bowl of milk. Friends can leave virtual
notes for one another on the walls outside their favorite restaurants, noting
which menu item is the most delicious.
Apps like Pokemon Go, the breakout augmented reality hit
that went viral globally last year, are just the beginning for Mr. Zuckerberg.
One day, he mused, household objects could perhaps be replaced entirely by
software.
“Think about how many of the things around us don’t
actually need to be physical,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in an interview last week.
“Instead of a $500 TV sitting in front of us, what’s to keep us from one day
having it be a $1 app?”
Facebook does not expect to build all of these software
experiences itself. At its annual developer conference on Tuesday, the social
network called for computer programmers to assist the company by building
augmented reality-based apps to work with what Facebook calls its Camera
Effects Platform. Facebook announced a new set of tools to help developers and
will begin the initiative with a small number of partners in a closed test.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s goal is ambitious — perhaps overly so.
Many augmented reality efforts have flopped in the past, including Google’s
much-hyped attempt around spectacles with the technology, known as Google
Glass. Facebook has previously gambled on other futuristic technologies —
including virtual reality with a $2 billion purchase of Oculus, the virtual
reality goggles maker, in 2014 — but Mr. Zuckerberg has acknowledged that it
has had difficulty finding traction.
The chief executive is also grappling with a wide range
of issues that have the potential to distract Facebook. The company is under
scrutiny for its position as an arbiter of mass media, and questions as to what
role Facebook should play in policing content across its platform of nearly two
billion regular users. That issue was thrust to the forefront this week after a
man posted on his Facebook page a video of a murder he committed.
Still, Mr. Zuckerberg said he intended to create the next
major app ecosystem that would work with Facebook’s in-app camera. If
successful, Facebook could be in a position similar to that of Apple, which
relies on the hundreds of millions of apps in its store to keep users buying
the company’s smartphones and tablets every year. Facebook, in turn, wants
developers to build experiences that entice people to visit its website and
apps on a daily — if not hourly — basis.
“Just like Apple built the iPod and iTunes ecosystem
before the iPhone, you want to make sure there’s a set of content there, even
if there’s not everything,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
Facebook has been building toward this goal for some
time. Mr. Zuckerberg has spent the past 18 months reorganizing his company and
its suite of consumer apps — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger —
around a new interface, focused almost entirely on the camera. Slowly, the
company has downplayed the role of text inside its apps, instead encouraging
people to take and send photos and videos to one another by accessing the
in-app camera features.
In time, Facebook hopes that companies like Electronic
Arts, Nike and Warner Brothers — which are part of the initial set of partners
— will be the ones to bring immersive augmented reality experiences to
Facebook’s platform.
One early partner app is Giphy Thoughts, made by Giphy, a
short-form video start-up that acts as a search engine for animated GIFs. With
Giphy Thoughts, for instance, people can attach cartoon thought bubbles above
the heads of people they view through their Facebook camera lens.
“It goes back to creative expression,” said David
Rosenberg, director of business development at Giphy. “Facebook Camera is just
going to be this massive audience of people ready to make deeply personal
content they can share with their friends.”
Facebook’s past attempts to be at the center of an apps
ecosystem have not been particularly successful. In 2012, the company released
App Center, a central hub within Facebook to discover third-party apps — like
Farmville, Goodreads and Spotify — and use them on the Facebook desktop site.
But that initiative fizzled as consumers slowly shifted away from desktops to
smartphones.
One year later, Facebook tried to emulate Apple and
Google’s platform strategy more directly with its own Facebook-branded smartphone,
called Facebook Home. The phone, a product of a partnership with AT&T and
HTC, sold poorly and was eventually abandoned.
Then came Facebook’s most aggressive move, with the 2014
acquisition of Oculus. Facebook is spending hundreds of millions of dollars
more investing in V.R. content and apps in the hopes that it will mature into a
full-fledged ecosystem similar to Apple’s App Store, but sales of the Oculus
Rift goggles have been slow.
Mr. Zuckerberg has said the efforts with Oculus will take
longer than he and his team initially believed, and likely billions of dollars
more in investment. But in last week’s interview, he said that some of the
technology acquired in the Oculus purchase have helped create the seeds of the
new augmented reality platform.
Facebook is not alone in its quest to establish a
foothold in augmented reality. Hours before Facebook’s developer conference on
Tuesday morning, Snapchat — a professed “camera company” and Facebook’s direct
competitor for attention — announced its own take on augmented reality,
offering new 3-D lenses for use inside its app. The effect is similar to some
of the ideas Mr. Zuckerberg has described. Snapchat also offers Spectacles, a
pair of glasses that allow users to record video from their faces.
Microsoft has its version of an augmented reality
headset, called HoloLens, which it unveiled two years ago.
Another dark horse is Magic Leap, the secretive augmented
reality start-up that has an enormous investment from Google and Alibaba and is
working on hardware to offer a similar experience. The company has yet to
unveil an official product.
For the near term, however, Mr. Zuckerberg sees the
smartphone camera as the first step forward.
“We want to get to this world in the future where you
eventually have glasses or contact lenses where you can mix digital or physical
objects in the digital world,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
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