Facebook F8 conference 2017: the latest news and biggest changes coming to the platform – The Verge

Facebook’s plans to augment reality are as dystopian as they are smart

2017-04-20T17:08:52-04:00

Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story feels more prescient every year. The 2010 dystopian fiction novel imagined a world where holographic, smartphone-like devices called äppäräts project everyone's personal information all of the time, while a mammoth world-spanning social network called GlobalTeens stratifies society by their looks and net worth.

In Shteyngart's not-too-distant future, everyone is ranked with ludicrous metrics like Hotness and Fuckability, on credit score-esque scales out of 800. Society is forever on the brink of economic collapse, and yet the tech-obsessed populace worries only about its corporate status and the a …

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How Facebook is taking mind reading from sci-fi to reality

2017-04-20T15:42:21-04:00

The rumblings started months ago. Through a series of peculiar job listings and key hires, it became clear Facebook was up to something unlike anything it had ever pursued. Building 8, as the company would name it, was to be a new division under famed technologist Regina Dugan, former director of the government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Dugan had transitioned to the tech industry in 2012, serving as the head of Google's experimental ATAP group. Among other things, it was responsible for the promising but now defunct Ara modular smartphone project.

On Wednesday, Facebook took the wraps off Building 8 and had Dugan …

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Facebook’s AI-powered camera can blur photo backgrounds in real time

2017-04-19T15:05:13-04:00

Facebook is banking on the smartphone camera being the most influential and ubiquitous augmented reality platform in the future, and it's spent a healthy chunk of its F8 developer conference showing the world what this will look like. While virtual game boards and underwater effects are neat, the company is also developing AR features that are more subtle and way more useful.

One involves using a mix of the same type of computer vision and artificial intelligence-powered algorithms that place virtual images in a scene to do standard photo effects. So instead of placing a giant whale next to your cereal bowl, the camera emulates a low-apertu …

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Facebook says it’s working to let you ‘hear with your skin’

2017-04-19T15:03:29-04:00

Facebook's advanced hardware group is working on technology to let you "hear with your skin." The technology could be used to help deaf people communicate, but Facebook also envisions it as a way to advance communications for people who can already hear, allowing for such things as a conversation to be automatically translated into another language.

The technology is being developed by Facebook's Building 8 research group, led by ex-DARPA director and former head of Google's experimental research group Regina Dugan.

The idea has been around long before Facebook

Dugan compared the technology to the cochlea in your ear, which translates sound …

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Facebook is working on a way to let you type with your brain

2017-04-19T14:30:14-04:00

Facebook today unveiled a project from its secretive Building 8 research group that's working to create a brain-computer interface that lets you type with your thoughts. Regina Dugan, a former director of DARPA and the ex-head of Google's experimental ATAP research group, announced the news today onstage at Facebook's F8 developer conference. Dugan, who now heads up Building 8, says the goal is "something as simple as a yes-no brain click" that could fundamentally change how we interact with and use technology. While it does not exist today outside of very specific medical research trials, Dugan says her team is actively working to make it a …

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Facebook is making it way easier to record and share your VR experiences

2017-04-19T14:00:02-04:00

Oculus Rift | Photo by James Bareham / The Verge

Facebook today is launching a new developer toolkit that will make it easier for users to capture and share their personal experiences in VR, be it a moment in an Oculus Rift game or their personal point of view in a 360-degree live-action video. As it stands today, the best way to do this is to capture every frame of a scene, stitch it together into one image, and then encode the whole batch of images as a new video. The other method has been to simply stream whatever is happening onscreen through Twitch or YouTube, or to record it with third-party game-capture software.

Facebook has a new method for VR video capture

The stitching method is …

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Instagram for Android now works offline

2017-04-19T13:46:23-04:00

Facebook announced at its F8 developer conference that the Android version of Instagram is getting offline functionality. In fact, the features are already rolling out in certain parts of the world. (I was able to get some of it to work in New York on a phone running Android Nougat, for example.) Offline mode could eventually make it to iOS as well, according to TechCrunch.

The offline mode features go beyond just saving a draft or queueing up a photo at the top of the feed, which the app already let users do when they tried to post with poor service. You can now like or comment on other users' photos, or even follow and unfollow accounts, …

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Facebook is developing a helicopter to deliver internet access in emergencies

2017-04-19T13:22:35-04:00

Facebook is developing a small helicopter that can be deployed in emergencies to deliver internet access, the company said. Speaking at the F8 conference in San Jose today, the company said that the helicopter, dubbed "Tether-tenna," would provide "instant infrastructure" during times of crisis. "When completed, this technology will be able to be deployed immediately and operate for months at a time to bring back connectivity in case of an emergency," said Yael Maguire, who runs Facebook's Connectivity Lab, in a blog post.

Tether-tenna could be deployed in cases when cellular infrastructure was damaged but fiber lines in the area still work …

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Facebook’s new Surround 360 video cameras let you move around inside live-action scenes

2017-04-19T13:15:02-04:00

Facebook today announced the second generation of its Surround 360 video camera design, and this time the company is serious about helping potential customers purchase it as an actual product. The Surround 360, which Facebook unveiled last year as an open-source spec guide for others to build off of, has been upgraded as both a larger, more capable unit and a smaller, more portable version.

Facebook is calling the big model the x24, because it now has a 24-camera array arranged in an orb instead of the 17 cameras the original flying saucer-shaped Surround 360 called for. The small model is the x6, with just six cameras but in a far more man …

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Facebook Messenger is getting an Apple Music extension

2017-04-18T15:06:21-04:00

Facebook just announced a bunch of changes to Messenger, with the highlight being new ways for apps to integrate with it. And while it's not available yet, one of the standout partners announced was Apple Music.

Near the end of his presentation at Facebook's F8 conference this afternoon, David Marcus, head of Messenger, said, "I'm really excited to share with you that Apple Music will soon be on the platform as well."

Listen without leaving Messenger

There weren't any details beyond that, and Apple Music only got a "coming soon" label, so there isn't even a firm ETA on when it'll be available. But Facebook and Apple have worked together bef …

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