Facebook Messenger unveils Augmented Reality tool for businesses

San Francisco, May 2: To help small and large businesses reach out to 1.3 billion people who use Messenger every month, Facebook has launched an Augmented Reality (AR) tool for them.

With this tool, the businesses can leverage the “Camera Effects Platform” to easily integrate AR into their Messenger experience, bringing the virtual and physical worlds one step closer together.

”When a person interacts with your business in Messenger, you can prompt them to open the camera, which will be pre-populated with filters and AR effects that are specific to your brand,” David Marcus, Vice President of Messaging Products, said in a blog post on Tuesday.

From there, people can share the image or video to their story or in a group or one-to conversation or they can simply save it to their camera roll.

”To date, there are over 300,000 active bots on Messenger, and over 8 billion messages are exchanged between people and businesses each month — that’s 4 times the amount of messages exchanged since just last year,” Marcus informed as Facebook began its annual two-day F8 Developers’ Conference in San Jose on Tuesday.

”Today, there are 200,000 developers actively building experiences, forging connections between people and the brands they love and bringing real value to their everyday lives,” the post added.

To begin with, ASUS, Kia, Nike and Sephora will launch AR effects for their Messenger experiences. IANS