SAN JOSE, Calif. _ Looking to blend digital and physical worlds, Facebook is betting big on augmented reality.
"We're going to make the camera the first augmented reality platform," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday during the tech firm's developer conference in San Jose.
Augmented reality allows users to overlay computer-generated images in the real world. People can add 3-D effects to their photos, leave a digital note for their spouse or create a work of art.
Taking on rival Snapchat, Facebook recently launched a camera app so users can add filters and effects to their photos and videos. Now they're turning to developers to help them build more augmented reality features within Facebook's camera.
When Facebook first launched in 2004, the company's focus was connecting family and friends. Today, the tech firm is building community in a time when society is divided, Zuckerberg said
Facebook, though, has grappled with a number of challenges within the last year from the spread of fake news during the presidential election to violence streamed on live video.
The tech firm's developer conference came a day after Facebook said it was reviewing how users report videos that run afoul of its rules after an Ohio man posted a video of himself shooting and killing an elderly man. The shooter than confessed to the crime on live video, but it took a while before the video was reported and more than two hours passed before Facebook disabled the suspect's social media account.
"We have a lot more to do here and we're reminded by this in the tragedy in Cleveland," Zuckerberg said.
The suspect in the shooting killed himself Tuesday after a brief police chase, officers said.
More than 4,000 developers from around the world were expected to attend the company's conference on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Facebook first opened up its social network to app developers during its first F8 conference in 2007. Back then, the site only had 24 million active users, the "like" button didn't even exist and the tech firm wasn't a publicly traded company. Zuckerberg, who co-founded the social network in a Harvard dorm room, was also only 23 years old and went on stage wearing flip flops.
Now the tech firm has grown to 1.9 billion users and is making big bets on messaging, virtual reality, chatbots and even internet-beaming drones. It owns Instagram, WhatsApp and virtual reality company Oculus.
