Facebook is building glasses that could beam virtual friends into your home

(Reuters)

Facebook has confirmed it's working on a pair of augmented reality glasses.

The sci-fi goggles would let you see virtual objects in the real world – as if they were actually there.

The social network's AR chief Ficus Kirkpatrick told TechCrunch: "Yeah! Well of course we're working on it."

He went on: "We are building hardware products. We're going forward on this...

"I want to see those glasses come into reality, and I think we want to play our part in helping to bring them here."

Augmented reality is a fast-growing type of technology that puts overlays 3D computer-generated graphics into the world around you.

A very basic example of this is the hugely popular Pokémon Go mobile game, which lets you see virtual Pokémon using your smartphone's camera.

But proper AR tech in the future could revolutionize the world – letting people transport anywhere virtually, and simulate pets or even giant cinema screens.

You could invite friends over to your house and have them appear in virtual AR form, or you could potentially use an app like Facebook on any surface or in mid-air – just like the Minority Report movie.

But Facebook is still some way off its AR glasses.

"We have no product to announce right now," Kickpatrick said, during TechCrunch's AR/VR event in Los Angeles.

"But we have a lot of very talented people doing really, really compelling cutting-edge research that we hope plays a part in the future of headsets."

This isn't the first time Facebook has shown interest in augmented reality, of course.

Speaking in April last year, billionaire Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg said he could foresee a future where AR specs existed.

"We all know where we want this to get eventually, we want glasses," Zuck said.

"We do not have the science or technology today to build the AR glasses that we want.

"We may in five years, or seven years."

He added: "We can't build the AR product that we want today, so building VR is the path to getting to those AR glasses."

Facebook also owns a company called Oculus, which produces the Oculus Rift – a virtual reality headset.

Virtual reality is slightly different in that it completely replaces your world view with CGI – rather than adding to (or "augmenting") it.

But whether it's AR or VR, Kirkpatrick thinks it won't completely take over our lives.

"I don't think we converge to one single device...I don't think we're going to end up in a Ready Player One future where everyone is just hanging out in VR all the time," the Facebook AR chief explained.

He continued: "I think we're still going to have the lives that we have today where you stay at home and you have maybe an escapist, immersive experience or you use VR to transport yourself somewhere else.

"But I think those things like the people you connect with, the things you're doing, the state of your apps and everything needs to be carried and portable and on-the-go with you as well, and I think that's going to look more like how we think about AR."

This story originally appeared in The Sun.