Facebook fires directly at Snapchat with augmented reality platform, 'Camera Effects'
During the opening moments of this year's F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg began showing off the company's augmented reality strategy, and it looks pretty damn amazing.
First, Zuckerberg announced Facebook's new augmented reality platform called Camera Effects Platform. The platform is launching as an open beta starting today, and Zuckerberg showed off a number of examples of what will be possible in the future with the platform.
The examples included commerce applications that would allow you to tag real world objects and perhaps even sell them.
He also showed another example that offered a look at how Nike might integrate your workout information with AR overlays.
Additionally, Zuckerberg showed off art and gaming experiences, including allowing anyone to play a tabletop game with 3D characters anywhere, or place art or personal graffiti in real-world places, only revealed to others through AR.
Part of how this is accomplished is through a method Zuckerberg called simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), object recognition, and 3D mapping.
Two of the coding tools available to developers today are the platform's AR Studio and Frame Studio. AR Studio is targeted at letting developers create AR masks over human faces, while Fame Studio is, as its name indicates, more geared toward allowing developers to create AR frames around real world images and video.
All in all, it looks like Facebook just took a huge shot at not only Snapchat's AR ambitions but Apple's rumored new AR features expected to come along with the iPhone 8.
Along with Facebook's heavy investment in VR, this is effectively Zuckerberg betting big on the future of virtual objects and interactions with those objects. So far, it's looking like a good bet.
Topics Facebook
