Facebook concluded the F8 conference yesterday and there was no shortage of the company’s plans for its future as shared to the developers and to the world.
Tether-tenna
This is actually a surprising piece of tech. Facebook announced the Tether-tenna which is what they call a “insta-infrastructure” that consists of a small helicopter tethered to wire with fiber and power. This helicopter can be deployed in need and would bring back connectivity in case of emergency.
Building 8 & projects focused on silent speech communications
Facebook is also looking at two ways we can communicate with our devices beyond the current system of using either voice or manual commands.
The company is working on a system that will let people type with their brains, which is something we get to see on movies. Their goal is to create a ‘silent speech’ system that will allow you to type 100 words per minute straight from your brain, which is as fast as what some people do on the laptop and five times faster than typing on your smartphone.They want to implement this with non-invasive wearable sensors that will be mass produced.
The second system is one where they want people to hear with their skin. As weird as it sounds, Facebook is building the hardware and software that is necessary to deliver language through the skin which is something we should look forward to in the future.
These technologies will be done at Building 8, which is Facebook’s product development and research team. The products that will be made will be new, category defining and are social first that would ‘advance Facebook’s mission.’
Artificial Intelligence
AI is the future and Facebook wants to be a part of it. The company wants to use AI to make stuff like an AI fused camera on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. They want this camera to understand your surroundings and recognize people or things.
In addition to opening the Camera Effects Platform, Facebook open sourced Caffe2, a framework to run AI algorithms on a phone so that developers can create awesome content from it.
AR
Facebook is also serious about Augmented Reality.The company’s Chief of Oculus Research, Michael Abrash shared a vision where AR “enhances your vision and hearing seamlessly while being light, comfortable, power efficient and socially acceptable enough to accompany you everywhere.”
He also talked about virtual computing which will comprise of VR and AR as the next ‘great wave’ after personal computing, which we are yet to see.
VR
Facebook displayed their interest in virtual reality when they bought Oculus for $2 billion. Now they went a step further by introducing new designs for their Surround 360 which allows you to come up with high quality videos for VR. The new x24 design and the smaller x6 will allow you to create engaging VR content for the viewers.
