Facebook shares ‘delicious’ plans for augmented reality

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has seen the future — and it’s “delicious.”

Or so he declared in his keynote address on Tuesday at the social network’s annual F8 Developer Conference.

Zuckerberg’s “delicious” comment was accompanied with a still image of a normal room on a giant screen behind him, where it suddenly started raining 3-D Skittles.

The special effect, courtesy of a technology called SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping), is part and parcel of what Zuckerberg called the “next generation of Facebook’s Messenger Platform.”

It’s really an augmented reality (AR) platform that Zuckerberg plans to take mainstream.

But he’s not planning to take us there via headsets or glasses — as most had envisioned — but through apps downloaded onto smartphones.

“Augmented reality is going to help us mix the digital and the physical in all new ways,” he said at the 10th annual conference. “And that’s going to make our physical reality better.”

The AR version being advanced by Facebook has what Zuckerberg called three important “use cases.”

The first displays information over a screen image, such as notes about an artist alongside one of his or her creations.

The second allows the insertion of virtual objects into a real image, much like Pokémon Go.

And the third permits the enhancement of existing objects, such as transforming a photo of one’s house into Hogwarts Castle.

Zuckerberg, speaking at the San Jose Convention Center, insisted the initiatives are all being pursued on behalf of Facebook’s “next focus — building community.”

Much of what we do during our everyday lives feels so mundane we don’t even try to share our experiences, he explained.

But with Facebook’s AR platform, which went into a closed beta test on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said even the most tedious existence can be injected with enough virtual juice to make it share-worthy.