AR: The New Reality At Facebook

Why Facebook, Google, Snap, and dozens more love AR—and what’s coming next

- Dan Tynan

“If you take one thing away from today,” Mark Zuckerberg announced in April from the stage of F8, Facebook’s annual conference for developers, “this is it: We’re making the [smartphone] camera the first augmented-reality platform.”

Facebook had already begun adding camera effects to its apps, letting users overlay objects, animations, and filters on their images—an unabashed knockoff of Snapchat’s popular AR-powered Lenses. With a new open platform where developers can create their own effects, art, and 3-D games, Facebook is betting that it can become the go-to destination for AR experiences, a WeChat-like repository of third-party apps-within its-apps.

After years of dormancy, the hype around AR is ratcheting back up. Beyond Facebook’s augmented ambitions (which include, down the road, a wearable device), there’s Google’s four-year-old Glass, Microsoft’s HoloLens, and the mysterious, well-funded Magic Leap—along with a rumored device from Apple. According to market research firm CB Insights, 49 AR companies have secured equity financing deals since last spring—a 75% increase from the year before.

They’re all vying to dominate a future where the separation between the physical and the digital is wafer-thin, and you won’t need a keyboard or a touch screen to navigate it. “Augmented reality is the next mobile computer, the next OS, the next social platform,” says Ori Inbar, founder of Super Ventures, a VC firm specializing in AR. “The smartphone is dead; it just doesn’t know it yet.”

What pieces of this hyperbole might actually prove out? Here’s our three-part guide to how AR will actually unfold.

Our phones will be the gateway—for now