What Facebook prepares us: Virtual reality, Internet of things and Artificial Intelligence

Facebook is the king of social networks and is a long way from its competitors, but what can be complicated is to maintain that hegemony and Mark Zuckeberg knows it perfectly.That's why the CEO and creator of Facebook doesn't let of looking for new paths with which to expand its millionaire number of users.

Last April the F8 conference, the annual Zuckerberg meeting with the developers, was held to glimpse the steps to be followed by the social network in the coming years , the main lines to follow by the company, trying to create new communication needs that we, the users, have not even imagined.

A world connected by Facebook

The Internet of Things (IoT) is already a reality, but it has not finished starting.Until 2018 the standardization of 5G (the connection that promises to support all this data traffic) will not be fully achieved, but not it will be until 2020 when its final deployment occurs .

And it is that, although we find it hard to believe, today there are billions of people without internet connection , many of them for a poor or non-existent infrastructure).But there is also a large percentage that has no connection for economic reasons.To try to solve this, Zuckerberg has created Internet.org, which hopes to provide the Internet to 1 billion people in the next 5 years .

One of the possible solutions for this is through a satellite network created expressly for this purpose.These satellites will send the signal to a fleet of Aquila drones , powered by social energy, which will function as repeaters and They will send the signal to antennas located in the towns.

Facebook Live

All the multimedia content that is generated in the world every minute does not seem to be enough for Facebook, which presented its Mevo camera to broadcast live videos via Facebook Live , a streaming service to the purest Periscope style.

Unlike the Twitter video platform, Facebook Live will keep the videos on our wall so we can watch them whenever we want.Of course, we can also use our smartphone to record live videos and upload them to the platform.

Artificial Intelligence to talk to Facebook

Companies are still looking for the perfect virtual assistant so that the user can interact with the machines in a simpler and more natural way.Through Artificial Intelligence it is sought that these assistants recognize people , places and objects that appear in an image , not even in a video.This way you can, for example, intelligently sort our photographs (as Google Photos already does), sorting them by subjects, people, etc.

Also, a union of Artificial Intelligence and chatbots could make us talk with Facebook as if it were a person.The idea is that companies use their own bots in their Facebook profiles so that the user can have a conversation in natural language with him , requesting information for example or enriching customer service .

The first bots are already active (although for now only in English and for Messenger) and the results are very satisfactory, much better than talking to an answering machine , but this technology is just beginning and will pass some time until we see it fully operational.

360 Video and Virtual Reality as new social tools

With the purchase of Occulus, the company of Zuckerberg got fully into the world of virtual reality and immersive videos.It's been a while since we can upload our videos in 360 degrees to the social network and watch them with our Oculus glasses from our (virtual) Facebook wall.

But its goal is to achieve a totally virtual social network , focused on games and what they call the Virtual Social Reality, where we will interact with our Facebook contacts in a virtual environment in 360 degrees.We will be represented by some avatars that can interact with each other, move around the environment, etc. For example, we can meet a friend who lives miles away to watch a movie "together" and comment on it.

On the other hand, this will also change the way we watch videos, which will cease to be passive entertainment.With 360-degree videos, it is the viewer who chooses the angle, the plane, etc.and even the way to record videos ( One of the latest trends is to record weddings in this format ).To facilitate the work for the user, Facebook has created the Surround 360 , which includes 17 cameras that record simultaneously to obtain a video in 360 degrees of the highest quality.

This 360 surround will not be marketed by Facebook but will release the files for that everyone builds for themselves (using 3D printing), as well as necessary software.

As we can see, Facebook seeks to become much more than a social network.It wants to be the most complete leisure and communication platform , both real and virtual.Let's not forget that Facebook has recently bought WhatsApp or MSQRD, applications that can join others to create fun and original virtual conversations .

Images | Facebook, Karya.