Facebook isn’t engaged only in social networking. The company has an experimental lab called Building 8 which develops various hardware devices. Apparently, the lab came up something very interesting.
According to Bloomberg, Building 8 is working on a device with a wide-angle camera and a touch-sensitive screen. The main purpose of this smart gadget is video chatting – users will be able to communicate with each other as if they are in the same room. The novelty may be presented next spring at the F8 conference and the first prototypes are currently being tested.
Bloomberg, referring to its own sources, claims that Facebook can use Android as the operating system for the gadget instead of developing its own. The new video chatting device will have a laptop-sized display (13 to 15 inches) and motion-sensing camera. The data from microphones and the camera are processed by machine learning systems which are supposed to optimize the quality of communication and other aspects of user interface. For example, the camera will be able to automatically recognize people in the field of vision and then constantly keep them in the frame.
