Revving up its hardware efforts, social networking giant Facebook is now planning to build its own Augmented Reality (AR) glasses, TechCrunch reported. "Yeah! Well of course we're working on it," Facebook's AR Head Ficus Kirkpatrick was quoted as saying on Thursday at TechCrunch's AR/VR (virtual reality) event in Los Angeles. "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," Kirkpatrick said.
The announcement follows Facebook's launch of its first self-branded hardware - a pair of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered smart video chat devices, Portal and Portal +. Some of the other American tech giants have already ventured into the AR space already. While Microsoft has its HoloLens, Google Glass is being developed for the enterprise.
Apple has been talking about the potential of AR for quite some time now and the Cupertino, California-headquartered company earlier acquired AR hardware developers like Akonia Holographics and Vrvana to fast-track development of its own headsets. Facebook has big plan on VR as well. It acquired Oculus, a virtual reality company, in 2014 for $2 billion. The social network sees its Oculus VR headsets helping it bring the AR glasses by providing the software know-how.
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