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