Looking Past Facebook’s Trillion Dollar Value to the AR Hurdles Ahead

As Facebook made headlines yesterday for—at least temporarily—rebuffing federal and state antitrust cases and hitting a $1 trillion market value, I was listening to Facebook Reality Labs VP Andrew Bosworth muse on the company’s future in AR/VR. It struck me that as strong as Facebook’s business may look today, overcoming challenges posed by AR over the next decade may be much tougher.

On his new podcast, which debuted yesterday, Bosworth and his colleague Rebecca Van Dyck discussed one of those challenges: the difficulties of designing socially acceptable AR wearables. What is clear is that the two recognize that AR wearables have the potential to widen the digital divide. Not only will users of AR glasses, say, be equipped with sophisticated technology to help them navigate the world, but everyone around them without the glasses will be conscious of the difference. And that could create some problems.