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“Yeah! Well after all we’re working on it,” Facebook’s head of augmented reality Ficus Kirkpatrick told me after I asked him at TechCrunch’s AR/VR event in LA if Facebook was constructing AR glasses. “We are constructing hardware products. We’re going forward on this . . . We need to see those glasses come into reality, and I feel we wish to play our part in helping to bring them there.”
This is the clearest confirmation we’ve received yet from Facebook about its plans for AR glasses. The product may very well be Facebook’s opportunity to own a mainstream computing device on which its software could run after a decade of being beholden to smartphones built, controlled and taxed by Apple and Google.
Fresh off the heels of its first hardware launch, Facebook’s Fiscus Kirkpatrick says the corporate can be working on an AR headset https://t.co/AS8IMIO56b #TCARVR pic.twitter.com/eWW6JX22yc
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) October 24, 2018
This month, Facebook launched its first self-branded gadget out of its Building 8 lab, the Portal smart display, and now it’s revving up hardware efforts. For AR, Kirkpatrick told me, “We haven’t any product to announce right away. But now we have quite a lot of very talented people doing really, really compelling cutting-edge research that we hope plays a component in the longer term of headsets.”
There’s a war brewing here. AR startups like Magic Leap and Thalmic Labs are beginning to release their first headsets and glasses. Microsoft is taken into account a frontrunner because of its early HoloLens product, while Google Glass remains to be being developed for the enterprise. And Apple has acquired AR hardware developers like Akonia Holographics and Vrvana to speed up development of its own headsets.
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Mark Zuckerberg said at F8 2017 that AR glasses were 5 to 7 years away
Technological progress and competition seems to have sped up Facebook’s timetable. Back in April 2017, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “We all know where we wish this to get eventually, we wish glasses,” but explained that “we do not need the science or technology today to construct the AR glasses that we wish. We may in five years, or seven years.” He explained that “We can’t construct the AR product that we wish today, so constructing VR is the trail to attending to those AR glasses.” The company’s Oculus division had talked extensively concerning the potential of AR glasses, yet similarly characterised them as far off.
But just a few months later, a Facebook patent application for AR glasses was spotted by Business Insider that detailed using “waveguide display with two-dimensional scanner” to project media onto the lenses. Cheddar’s Alex Heath reports that Facebook is working on Project Sequoia that uses projectors to display AR experiences on top of physical objects like a chess board on a table or an individual’s likeness on something for teleconferencing. These indicate Facebook was moving past AR research.
Facebook AR glasses patent application
Last month, The Information spotted 4 Facebook job listings in search of engineers with experience constructing custom AR computer chips to hitch the Facebook Reality Lab (formerly often known as Oculus research). And every week later, Oculus’ Chief Scientist Michael Abrash briefly mentioned amidst a half-hour technical keynote at the corporate’s VR conference that “No off the shelf display technology is sweet enough for AR, so we had no selection but to develop a brand new display system. And that system also has the potential to bring VR to a distinct level.”
But Kirkpatrick clarified that he sees Facebook’s AR efforts not only as a mixed reality feature of VR headsets. “I don’t think we converge to 1 single device . . . I don’t think we’re going to find yourself in a Ready Player One future where everyone seems to be just hanging out in VR on a regular basis,” he tells me. “I feel we’re still going to have the lives that now we have today where you stay at home and you might have possibly an escapist, immersive experience or you employ VR to move yourself someplace else. But I feel those things just like the people you connect with, the belongings you’re doing, the state of your apps and the whole lot must be carried and portable on-the-go with you as well, and I feel that’s going to look more like how we take into consideration AR.”
Oculus Chief Scientist Michael Abrash makes predictions concerning the way forward for AR and VR on the Oculus Connect 5 conference
Oculus virtual reality headsets and Facebook augmented reality glasses could share an underlying software layer, though, which could speed up engineering efforts while making the interface more familiar for users. “I feel that each one these things will converge indirectly possibly on the software level,” Kirkpatrick said.
The problem for Facebook AR is that it could run into the identical privacy concerns that individuals had about putting a Portal camera inside their homes. While VR headsets generate a fictional world, AR must collect data about your real-world surroundings. That could raise fears about Facebook surveilling not only our homes but the whole lot we do, and using that data to power ad targeting and content recommendations. This brand tax haunts Facebook’s every move.
Startups with a cleaner slate like Magic Leap and giants with a greater track record on privacy like Apple could have a better time getting users to place a camera on their heads. Facebook would likely need a best-in-class gadget that does much that others can’t with a purpose to persuade people it deserves to enhance their reality.
You can watch our full interview with Facebook’s director of camera and head of augmented reality engineering Ficus Kirkpatrick from our TechCrunch Sessions: AR/VR event in LA:
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