Facebook Brings Augmented Reality to Messenger App
May 2, 2018
Apex United Corporation is your business and support solutions for marketing and technology. Today we’re looking at the latest technology news coming from Facebook.
Facebook’s latest attempt to bring Augmented Reality into the mainstream for businesses and consumers was unveiled yesterday by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg spoke at Facebook Inc’s annual F8 developers conference in San Jose, California and said that, “Targeting the 1.3 billion people who use Facebook’s Messenger service with ads will be an important part of the company’s long-term revenue growth.” The Augmented Reality (AR) features the ability for business owners to be able to chat and connect to shoppers with augmented experiences and tools, and to get people to buy product’s on their website. Two major businesses, sportswear-giant and beauty maker Sephora will be one of the first businesses to use the feature. Sephora will use AR to let customers try on cosmetics virtually, while Nike will use AR to show 3D models of new sneakers up close, and be able to rotate and zoom on different details. Other companies jumping on the AR ship include tech-maker ASUS and car manufacturer KIA.
Facebook, which is the world’s largest social-media network, encourages businesses to connect with customers via chat for customer service purposes. This move will allow advertisers to mix animated images over real life which will enable customers and allow them to visualize products before buying them. Facebook gave these directions to app developers: When people interact with businesses in Messenger, they can be prompted to open the camera, which will be pre-programmed with different filters and AR effects. From there, they will be get a sense of the company, and be able to share the image/video to Facebook or their camera roll. Advertisers, like KIA, will give the customer an idea of how a car would look in their driveway if they decided to purchase it.
This move helps Facebook’s advertising business because marketers can place ads directly into the messenger service. Facebook will sell ads in its news feed that will connect to Messenger conversations. The social-media giant isn’t worried about turning off Facebook Messenger users because they must opt in to talk to a business on the service, and hopefully people will find it helpful. Facebook also attracts businesses in different ways, such as automated “bots” that reply to customers’ inquiries. Facebook says there are now over 300,000 computerized bots that let companies speak directly to consumers and over 8 billion messages are exchanged between consumers and businesses each month. This is three times the amount from a year ago.
Apex United Corporation wants to know: Would you use Augmented Reality to shop online for products and services?
