Last year Facebook unveiled its grand vision for the next ten years. Zuckerberg revealed that the projects would include ecosystems, products, and technologies that would redefine social media sharing and allow everybody to share everything with everyone else. From solar powered drones beaming internet access to a huge project on Artificial Intelligence, Facebook is slowly but surely building all of these in its secret development unit called Building 8. Take a look at the 4 most ambitious futuristic Facebook projects being developed by Facebook to be released over the next ten years.
That’s right. Facebook is building solar-powered drones that will beam Internet connectivity down to earth. The Solar-powered drone named Aquila was completed till testing stage last year where it ran a successful test flight flying at a few thousand feet for 96 minutes in Yuma Arizona. The ultimate goal is to have a fleet of drones that will fly at an altitude of 60,000 feet with the capacity to fly three months at a time. The drones will possess the technology to beam down internet connectivity to every corner of the earth. The project isn’t quite ready with several more test flights to go.
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With the purchase of Occulus in 2014 and the release of Oculus products in 2016, Facebook plans to make AR and VR devices as small as your regular sized glasses. Facebook plans to go beyond just gaming and make VR and AR a social platform where you can interact wearing these headsets on social platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Pinterest.
Moreover, as part of even more ambitious Facebook futuristic projects, the company wants to be able to provide a virtual get together experience where you could even catch up with a friend in another city through virtual reality. The technology would use a dome studded with 500 cameras called a panoptic studio where images would be captured in 3D. This would herald a new era of virtual social reality.
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Facebook has lined up several new projects that involve using artificial intelligence in various applications and functions. From regular bots that perform tasks to those who can interact and provide business suggestions that enable faster business decisions and even more powerful voice recognition software. Facebook’s goal is to eventually enable computers to have meaningful conversations with humans. The man behind Facebook AI program is Yann Le Cunn who runs FB’s AI research called FAIR.
In case you didn’t know it, AI is already integrated with FB messenger to enable users to enjoy every possible feature of the platform rather than for it to remain just a chatbox. Called “M” the FB messenger AI feature will suggest answers, responses and even post emojis to chats for you preempting your requirements based on your usage behavior. Presently “M’ is available for users in the US only.
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As part of Facebook’s futuristic projects, this is by far the most amazing. Facebook’s brain-computer interface is the ultimate project being developed in their secretly facility building F8. In April, the social media giant revealed that 60 engineers are working on building a brain-computer interface that will allow you to type with just your mind without using invasive implants. The function will use optical imaging that scans your brain at 10 times per second to detect when you speak silently in your head and then translate that into text. This will enable people to control AR and VR experiences with their mind instead of a screen controller.
Building 8 started the project in October 2015 and is in collaboration with UC San Francisco UC Berkley, John Hopkins medicine, John Hopkins University’s applied physics Laboratory and Washington university school of medicine. The mega project involves specialists in machine learning for decoding speech and language, optical neuro-imaging systems with advance spatial resolution and advanced neural prosthetics. Now that would be really something and indeed the future.
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