Facebooks MicroLED lens will change everything when know about AR by providing high quality AR graphics to the masses bringing AR technology to everyday life.
The social media giant known as Facebook is a constant in the loves of many social media users, from the casual to the hardcore.
Facebook keeps you connected to friends and family, gives you the latest in local and world news, and could be bringing Augmented Reality Glasses to the masses. Facebook has announced that it is partnering with UK manufacturer Plessey, which specializes in designing and producing microLED displays, to bring Augmented Reality to a point that today's smartphones will be one day obsolete. Plessey, one of the only companies that designs and commercializes microLED displays – a technology that combines high definition and small formats, and is therefore particularly fitting for AR headsets.
The arrangement between Facebook and Plessey is a multi-year partnership by which Plessey will dedicate its LED manufacturing operations to helping Facebook develop microLED wafers for future AR and VR products. They will also be granting Facebook exclusive licence to some of its intellectual property. The manufacturing company's CEO Keith Strickland said: "This agreement recognizes the significant advances in our capabilities that we have made in recent years and we very much look forward to working with Facebook to help bring their vision to life."
For Facebook, which has wanted to and said they would make AR glasses a reality for many years now, the technology could therefore be a game-changer. "With a future AR glasses product, we envision a glasses form factor that lets devices melt away"said the social media platform as it announced the new partnership. They continued to say "This will take years, so across AR/VR we're continuing to invest in extensive research on this deep tech stack and components such as small-scale displays." Obviously when Facebook's AR glasses are up and running, smartphones will be a thing of the past. No more Samsung smartphones vs Apple smartphones, it'll be more like Samsung AR vs Apple AR. This opens world of opportunities for game design industry. This will change the mobile game market for sure.
Facebook is not the only company keeping a close eye on the microLED scene. MicroLED displays are not just an evolution for AR and VR headsets, HDTVs, smartphones and other wearable can benefit from MicroLED technology. In fact, Research consultancy Yole Development predicts that the microLED market could reach up to 330 million units by the year 2025.
So one day in the future we will all be walking around with AR glasses, regardless of our individual need for glasses, in place of our smartphones. Like something out of a sci-fi movie. This could be a new window into game development jobs as they will now have a bigger augmented reality market. Do you have any idea's for new apps that uses AR technology? As augmented reality gets normalized into our society could you develop the next viral app of the future? I hope you developers are excited we will have more on this as it comes.
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Written By Tech Journalist Joshua Lowe
