Facebook comes next for your TV, with a decoder called "Ripley" – BGR

Despite privacy scandals and conventional misconceptions that society's ability to manage consumer data has been significantly eroded in recent years, Facebook is increasingly interested in developing a hardware business. computer and produce a range of products that you actually want to install around your computer. House.

These devices include the social media giant's portal cameras, which allow users to make video calls and use A.I. to "follow" the user as he moves during the call. They ship next month. In addition, a device will be installed on top of your TV, whose development is referenced internally on Facebook under the code name of the project "Ripley". By a report via Cheddar, this device would allow video calls with some entertainment media consumption.

The news site reports today: "Facebook ($ FB) plans to announce the Ripley project in the spring of 2019, according to one person with direct knowledge of the project. But the device is still in development and the date could be changed. Portal's publication has been postponed earlier this year due, in particular, to the privacy scandals revealed by the fact that the British company Cambridge Analytica had exploited the data of millions of Facebook users for support Trump's presidential campaign in the United States.

Until now, Facebook has declined to comment on the Ripley project, which could probably place Facebook in a more direct competition with established actors such as Roku and Amazon for a part of your TV-related attention.

In the meantime, it goes without saying that Facebook's hardware ambitions – which go well beyond the previous two projects – will also be so if business confidence remains as intractable as it is when it comes to hardware. ; aujourd & # 39; hui.

This year, for example, there were several headlines after which the company's consumer data was jeopardized or violated. And yet, Facebook hopes that enough customers are willing to spend a few hundred dollars to buy products that offer the world's largest social networking company a permanent physical place at home.

In addition to the company's well-established Oculus VR brand, the company also continued its efforts in the field of moonshot material, which at one time included a cuff that could translate sound into understandable vibrations through human skin. This project would have been put aside, but another project, dubbed Edgefield, has about a dozen Facebook employees tasked to work on it. It is essentially a brain interface.

Once again, Cheddar"Facebook is also tinkering with computer hardware in the nascent field of Augmented Reality (AR), technology that companies like Magic Leap are pursuing to overlay virtual objects to the real world.

"Another project, called Sequoia code, uses a projector to create a virtual AR experiment that projects virtual objects and moves them into a physical space. The first demonstrations included displaying virtual board games on a physical table, reading children's animation books, and projecting a person's image onto physical objects for videoconferencing purposes. "

Source of the image: LODI Franck / SIPA / Shutterstock