Updates from Day 1
It is all about Camera Effects, Augmented Reality and Bots
Mark Zuckerberg opened with an announcement of Facebook’s Camera Effects Platform, which allows developers to build augmented reality tools for the camera to bring people together: AR is going to help us mix the digital and the physical in new ways, and make our physical lives better.
They launched Facebook Spaces, social virtual reality platform. With Spaces, one can hang out with friends, teleport anywhere and do anything.
Facebook is opening up ‘Messenger’ as a platform for developers. That means developers will be able to add in new functionality to Messenger — things like Giphy for on-the-fly GIF searching, goofy voice changers for voice messages, a drawing pad for doodling things up for your friends, etc. Adding more fun and Gamification and ownership.
VR in the newsfeed! – Now FB will support 3D, spherical video in the newsfeed. One can pan around the video with the mouse cursor. While spherical video looks a bit strange on a flat screen, the key here is Facebook’s purchase of the Oculus Rift. Strap on a VR headset and open up a 360° spherical video, and it’s almost like one is there.
They launched ‘Parse’ for ‘Internet Of Things’ — a set of SDKs (software development kit) that act as the backend brains for IoT projects. It’s compatible with Arduino first, with other platforms on the way.
Updates from Day 2
Day 2 of F8 conference was all about setting the vision for the future.Facebook also stated a new goal to “create and ship new, category-defining consumer products that are social first, at scale.”
New world to the way we capture images and videos will be there and it is called ‘New Surround 360 cameras’ – two new 360-degree developer cameras, the x24 and the x6, to join FB’s Surround 360 line that the company
Terragraph, Aquila and Tether-tenna – Facebook is trying to connect the world to a whole new level with cutting edge developments of tools and technologies. The innovations and experiments are in the beta phase, however the company is excited about it and has kept the newness alive giving yet one more reason to be curious on what next (Tether-tenna, a small helicopter attached to a fiber line that can be flown to create a virtual tower a few hundred feet above the ground)
Building 8 – Building a few awe-inspiring, if terrifying, technologies. – a “brain mouse for AR” (a silent speech interface with the speed and flexibility of voice and privacy of text)
Facebook has a goal of creating a system capable of typing 100 words per minute, straight from the speech center of your brain — 5x faster than you can type on your smart phone today.
Content Credits – Live Tweets from F8, techcrunch and futurefive, mashable