Then there's that big blank white wall. To the naked eye, there's nothing there. But if you look at it through your phone's camera with a special app that Facebook created, a world of color suddenly appears. Streaks of blue and turquoise and white jut out in front of you, on the floor and zigzag up to the walls. A waterfall of virtual blue paint cascades down from the roof, dripping into a digital puddle on the floor. If you look at this blank wall at Facebook headquarters through a a special app, an augmented reality art piece appears.
The installation was created by Heather Day, a 28-year-old San Francisco-based artist, It's the first large scale piece of art created with Facebook Camera, a new platform for augmented reality, or AR, in which digital images are overlaid on top of what you're seeing in the real world, Zuckerberg showed off the art project in April at F8, its annual gathering of software developers and Facebook's biggest event of the year, In August, I became one of the first reporters to see Day's invisible art installation in person, The wooden plaque iphone 10 xr case on the wall says "FB AIR Collection," short for Facebook artist-in-residence, But if you glance at it quickly, you might misread it as "AR Collection."If Facebook has its way, that would be more premonition than error, The kind of world where an entire collection of AR art exists is the kind of world Zuckerberg and the world's biggest social network are trying to create..
"You can just be walking and say, 'Oh my god, I'm standing in a painting right now,'" says Day from her sunny, three-story loft and work studio in San Francisco's Dogpatch district. "It's new territory."Augmented reality has become an obsession for Silicon Valley. Most tech companies see it as the next wave in computing, either as a bridge to virtual reality -- made up worlds that exist only on your digital devices -- or a destination all its own. Right now, AR is synonymous with Pokemon Go, the mobile game that spurred a lot of us last year to go outside and catch digital monsters in the world around us.
Snapchat, meanwhile, has pioneered much of the way young people currently use AR on their phones, with photo and video filters that superimpose a flower crown or a dog nose over your snaps, Apple has a platform called ARKit that lets software developers build AR apps for iPhones, Google followed suit last month with its own platform for Android-powered phones, called ARCore, But the technology also opens up possibilities of iphone 10 xr case sci-fi lore, Eventually, with a good pair of AR glasses -- something Facebook says it's working on -- you might be able to see if your kid has a fever just by looking at him, You could take your entire workspace with you on a flight, without ever opening up a laptop, You might never buy a new TV again, if all you need is a digital screen over your eyes..
But AR goes beyond the bounds of utilitarian. Part of the promise -- and peculiarity -- of augmented reality is that it muddles the line between the world made of atoms and the world made of zeros and ones. It's Alice and the Cheshire Cat. In March, Day wrote a letter to Zuckerberg, unprompted. Her request was simple: she wanted to work with Facebook on a virtual reality project. "To many, technology seems unapproachable," Day wrote. "But through art, technology becomes more human and even an artistic medium in its own right."Day never sent the letter, but coincidentally, Zuck and Co. came calling anyway. An abstract expressionist painter, she'd already been making a name for herself as the go-to artist for tech companies.