Facebook’s F8 2019 Conference Highlights the Company’s Current Plans for AR/VR and what the AR/VR Social Media Market May Look Like in the Future

At Facebook’s F8 2019 annual conference, the company made several updates and announcements about its social media platforms (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp) and Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) proposition (via Spark AR Studio and Oculus), with a main focus on user privacy. The company continues to push and support the development of emerging technologies by expanding the capabilities of the AR development platform Spark AR Studio and enriching the VR headset family with new devices. More specifically, Oculus announced its next generation VR headsets, the standalone Oculus Quest and the tethered Oculus Rift S, which are available for purchase in 22 countries The company also supports and pushes more VR for enterprise applications, encouraging businesses to reshape their business models and integrate them with VR tools. In addition, the Spark AR Studio now supports both Mac and Windows, and in the summer will be available to all users for creating and publishing their own AR experiences on Instagram, without being limited by a closed beta program or their coding skills.

The extended capabilities of Spark AR Studio are very promising because they will provide more flexibility to users to design new immersive and interactive AR content, and will allow more businesses and individuals to offer unique experiences to their customers/followers that will maintain their interest and, finally. increase sales and popularity. In accordance with current marketing trends, customer satisfaction, engagement, interaction, and personalized experiences are among the most important parameters that determine customer loyalty and brand awareness. Customized AR filters can increase levels of engagement and enhance the customer experience with interactive elements and the positive feelings they usually generate. Spark AR studio will provide any business with the opportunity to design unique AR filters to represent the key features of its brand and drive specific business objectives. Moreover, AR is a tool that allows customers who want to become brand advocates to express their affinity for brands while at the same time assisting those brands in raising awareness. Being able to virtually “try on” products not only encourages customers to spend more time exploring them, but also allows the customer to customize products to their needs and desires and make more confident decisions about their purchases.

On the VR side, both of Oculus’ new headsets provide more flexibility to users, removing the barrier of external sensors as they include inside-out tracking systems with Six Degrees of Freedom (6DoF) tracking. Moreover, Oculus for Business launched Quest enterprise edition along with Oculus Go, encouraging businesses to buy into VR for training employees, boosting productivity, reducing costs, and ensuring that employees are trained in safe environments. Oculus for Business encourages standalone headsets for enterprise use cases due to their flexibility, and the enterprise edition provides a software suite for device management and support for customized use cases. The solution is ideal for large-scale VR deployments assisting business to accelerate and optimize the VR implementation process.

The number of AR applications for marketing, product visualization, and entertainment is continuously increasing, providing various options to both consumers and businesses. Facebook’s advantage is its large user base (2.7 billion users across all apps), more than 1 billion of which have already experimented with AR filters. Businesses can advertise their products or services on Facebook’s platforms to a wider audience, while at the same time users are not required to download a separate app on their device to interact with AR content. This streamlining of content access is a market-wide trend, and crucial for user retention.

Despite this, Spark AR Studio’s new capabilities are currently focused on entertainment/marketing usage, which is very promising because it will compel more and more users and businesses to experiment, better understand, and massively adopt AR solutions, which in turn will lead to the development of higher quality AR applications in the long term. Facebook hopes that it can remain a player here by acting early and continuing to invest in the technology. The integration of AR and VR tools in gaming, entertainment, and communication is an important part of the AR/VR market evolution, enabling providers to enhance the capabilities, technical features, and user experience of these tools, and at the same time allowing users to embrace and better understand the content and its potential.

All in all, the integration of AR solutions into social media platforms at this stage is focused on enhancing communication and brand awareness and increasing user/customer engagement. Sales growth is an indirect and long-term goal that results from the factors mentioned above. On the VR side, the new hardware for both consumers and enterprises seems to be valuable/worthy in terms of flexibility and price. Privacy within the AR/VR ecosystem is another upcoming trend that will gain the attention in the future and will prove to shape the market more than many expect.