Mark Zuckerberg sees augmented reality ecosystem in Facebook

Says, he envisioned a world in which people could point smartphone cameras at a bowl of cereal

Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has long rued the day that Apple and Google beat him to building smartphones, which now underpin many people’s digital lives. Ever since, he has searched for the next frontier of modern computing and how to be a part of it from the start.

Now, Zuckerberg is betting he has found it: The real world.

On Tuesday, Zuckerberg introduced what he positioned as the first mainstream augmented reality platform, a way for people to view and digitally manipulate the physical world around them through the lens of their smartphone cameras.

What that means today is fairly limited. Augmented