“Yeah! Well of course we’re working on it,” Facebook’s [1] head of augmented reality Ficus Kirkpatrick told me when I asked him at TechCrunch’s AR/VR event in LA if Facebook was building AR glasses. “We are building hardware products. We’re going forward on this . . . We want to see those glasses come into reality, and I think we want 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 could 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.
This month, Facebook launched its first self-branded gadget out of its Building 8 lab, the Portal smart display[2], and now it’s revving up hardware efforts. For AR, Kirkpatrick told me, “We have no product to announce right now. But we have a lot of very talented people doing really, really compelling cutting-edge research that we hope plays a part in the future of headsets.”
There’s a war brewing here. AR startups like Magic Leap[3] and Thalmic Labs[4] are starting to release their first headsets and glasses. Microsoft is considered a leader thanks to its early HoloLens product, while Google Glass is still being developed for the enterprise. And Apple has acquired AR hardware developers like Akonia Holographics[5] and Vrvana[6] to accelerate development of its own headsets.
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...