Is Facebook about to be on… your face?

We are getting pretty excited about Augmented Reality (AR) here at Mosh, and since our last blog we have even more to nerd out about. It seems the race to AR is accelerating faster than you can say, “Mark Zuckerberg”. Recently we talked about Facebook’s AR push via its camera platform.

Since then, the social-media-slash-everything-tech-related giant has filed a patent for its own brand of AR glasses.

That’s right. Facebook on your face.

Yup. Not content stealing the thunder of Snap’s Spectacles, Google Glass, Microsoft’s HoloLens and the likes with its AR Studio that turns the humble smartphone into an AR experience, Facebook has stepped it up another notch.

According to a patent filed by Oculus, the AR and Virtual Reality company bought by Facebook for US$2 billion in 2014, Facebook’s own glasses are not far off. They may be ready as early as 2022, according to some sources.

Business Insider got the scoop on the glasses, and reported the patent documents spoke of tech similar to that used in the HoloLens. Business Insider said the filing detailed how the product “may augment views of a physical, real-world environment with computer-generated elements” and “may be included in an eye-wear comprising a frame and a display assembly that presents media to a user’s eyes”.

The glasses will use a waveguide system that projects images and light into the user’s eye, said Business Insider. “The smart glasses would be able to display images, video, and work with connected speakers or headphones to play audio when worn”.

According to Engadget, Facebook’s play for wearable tech would make the products, well, more wearable. “It also seems like Facebook wants to make them look like ordinary glasses rather than adopt the chunky look of most VR headsets today. “That means the company has to find or develop components small and slim enough to fit into them.”

What does this advancement mean for social media marketing?

Zuckerberg has already called AR and VR “the next big thing” in computing, in April he predicted it would be a platform powerful enough to replace smartphones and the PC.

While that is not likely to be fully realised for five to ten years – this is an innovative train we want to be on. As we stated a couple of weeks back, using Facebook as the AR/VR platform immediately makes its community of billions of users accessible to the millions of businesses also on the platform. By giving those billions of people access to a brand through new and innovative techniques immediately gives any business a competitive advantage.

It’s a matter of when, not if, AR and VR become mainstream, so for now it seems the most effective way to be there when it all begins is to be on social media.