Insight | Qin Chao comments on F8 conference: It is still the Facebook we remember, the level of black technology is no different

In this issue of the Hard Startup Open Class, Leifeng.com invited Qin Chao, head of early projects and technical partner of Frees Capital, to comment on and interpret F8's keynote speech.

The following is a summary of the open class speech compiled by Leifeng.com.

Hello everyone, let's start now. Facebook was at about 1:00 am on the 19th. Overall, the audience's reaction was relatively flat, or compared with Google I/O and Apple WWDC, it was relatively flat. In the whole hour and a half, four or five parts were introduced. Now we will comment and review. It will take about 20 minutes, and then answer the corresponding questions.

First of all, many people will ask a question, what does F8 mean. About three years ago, I had the same question as everyone else, and asked people in Facebook, and I looked up relevant information online. The explanation of F8 on Wikipedia is that Facebook has a hacker culture, so at that time, Facebook often held 8-hour hackathons, so the origin of the name F8 means Facebook's 8-hour hackathon. Of course, now F8 refers to Facebook's annual developer conference, Google I/O, and Apple WWDC. If you are engaged in computer Internet now, these are the three conferences you have to attend every year. Add E3, a total of four conferences.

Let's review what was discussed at F8. I don't know if you watched last year's F8. First of all, let me say that although it is an annual conference, compared with Google I/O and Apple WWDC, Facebook's conference is not fixed in time. Sometimes it is in July, sometimes in August, like this year it is in April. Its time is more or less random, mainly depending on whether you can prepare for it. In addition, there were three years without F8 conference. The first one was in 2007, and then there were three years of vacancies, in 2009, 2012 and 2013. The opening is unshakable. Zuckerberg came on stage to tell everyone about Facebook's development in the past year and told developers what kind of developer platform we launched. You can go and get familiar with it.

This photo is from F8 two years ago. You can see that WhatsApp has 700 million users, Instagram has 300 million users, Facebook has 1.4 billion users, and Messenger has 600 million users. Now the number has doubled, Facebook has 1.8 billion users. The first session had relatively small seats, but later on there were more and more seats and participants. Apple WWDC costs $2,000, while F8 costs more than $500, which means it costs a lot less.

This is what Zuckerberg showed at F8 last year, and it was also the famous Facebook 10-year strategic plan released last year. As can be seen from the picture above, it took three years to build the Facebook ecosystem, and another five years to strengthen a series of applications, mainly WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.

In another ten years, we will build a good mobile Internet (Connectivity) infrastructure, such as sending satellites, drones, or airplanes that fly in the sky 24 hours a day to project WiFi signals to poor countries or poor areas in developing countries. The middle part is artificial intelligence, which refers to using artificial intelligence to solve this problem. He also talked a lot about artificial intelligence at this year's conference. Finally, VR and AR, which are familiar to everyone, were a hot spot for domestic entrepreneurship two years ago, but it is actually very difficult to succeed, and often requires the support of large companies.

Some media on YouTube compressed the one and a half hour press conference into ten minutes, so you can quickly go through what he said in the entire press conference. Then I will tell you what he said here and what developers need to prepare if they are interested. Okay, let's start now.

First of all, this thing comes from the VR device Oculus. After you put on the glasses, you can interact with your companions in the virtual space of the network. Your companions don't need to be around, as long as they also have the glasses. After both of you wear them, you can interact with your own virtual character portrait in the virtual space of the network. For example, you can play the game "H1Z1" in the network time. After putting on the VR device, each of you is a person in it, and you will be more real. In addition, this is also a tool for picking up girls, and I will explain it to you in detail later.

Let's go through it all first. First he talked about all the cool effects of the camera.

Here he demonstrated a camera development platform Camera Platform to developers. It is not just a simple camera function, but it integrates augmented reality technology into the camera development kit, so that you can easily open the camera and realize various augmented reality special effects. The first one is that according to the object being photographed and its corresponding position, you add some virtual objects next to it. Here you may see some words appear on the table, as well as some dynamic effects, which will automatically adapt to where the object should be as the lens shakes.

Another function discussed here is that 2D images can be processed directly to create a 3D effect, while changing the light and shadow of the image, or superimposing virtual objects, such as adding various special effects.

Here they are introducing to developers that the camera SDK they released can also perform pattern recognition on dynamic images in the camera, identify flower pots and cups, and add some unique virtual reality effects to objects. They can also play tower defense games and realize various augmented reality special effects.

The second speaker was CTO Mike Schroepfer, who showed the latest research results of the artificial intelligence department. For example, the first three pictures showed the status of artificial intelligence in the past, and the picture on the far right showed that they could not only identify targets and shapes, but also what kind of things they were. At the same time, for people, the 3D skeleton structure can be displayed. In sports scenes, the shape of people's legs, feet, and bodies can be studied.

The third speaker is Deb Liu, who is an Asian and whose parents are also Chinese. She is now the VP of the entire Facebook Developer Platform. She will bring you special effects tools related to photos.

You will find that for various domestic apps, such as Meitu Xiuxiu, these special effects have already been implemented. In China, things related to face and beauty are actually at the forefront of the world. Except for the slight difference in the middle, everything else has been realized.

The fourth speaker was Rachel, who was going to show Social VR, which is the SDK that enables socialization on Oculus VR glasses, and can help people develop social functions. She demonstrated the function of Spaces, which means that people can go to a virtual network environment, where they can hang out with friends and family, each with an avatar-like character, and then travel around the world with them, play ball, and so on.

In fact, it is similar to playing online games, such as League of Legends or World of Warcraft, where you control your own character, but here you are more immersed. Because you are wearing virtual reality glasses, you can fly to every corner of the world. If you buy these glasses for your girlfriend, you and your girlfriend can be in one of the places even if you are separated by two places. For example, if you are in China, you can fly to Antarctica and take her to enjoy the scenery. This is really a weapon to pick up girls.

You can download it in the Oculus Store, and the current version is still in Beta. You first select your avatar, and you can see the QQ Show from ten years ago, which was brought back by Facebook on the virtual reality platform and reworked to be more advanced. You can also say that QQ is actually at the forefront of the world. You can answer calls in VR and have Messenger video chats.

The fifth is David Marcus, who is the VP of Messenger. His position in Facebook is similar to Zhang Xiaolong's position in QQ. He was previously the CEO of PayPal, an overseas company, and is now poached by Facebook to take charge of the entire Messenger team. Messenger is generally the top priority of a company, because as a social animal, chatting and sending messages with others is a rigid need, and instant messaging tools have a high frequency and high stickiness, so basically any company will put instant messaging in an important position in its product line if it can succeed. This explains why Alibaba has been trying its best to do various things, such as adding social functions to Alipay and later making a strategic investment in DingTalk.

Facebook Messenger is currently working on strengthening chatbots and creating something similar to WeChat's open platform, allowing third-party individuals and companies to develop chatbots. In addition, they have just developed a new feature that allows you to develop attachments to instant chat messages into something supported by your own company. Here, Spotify (the world's largest legitimate streaming music service platform) is used as an example. You can send music to your friends or send music in group chats by integrating Spotify's plug-in on Messenger. WeChat tried this feature three years ago, but later stopped doing it. That is, in the attachments of the chat tool, you can support other companies' apps, such as adding NetEase Cloud Music, so that you can send songs to friends or send takeout here.

Let's talk about some specific content. Facebook released something called Spaces on VR glasses. What it does is to let everyone have an image like Avatar and do various things. After everyone has an Avatar image, they can do various interactions in it. The most amazing thing is that you can switch scenes. There is something similar to a crystal ball. You can change the scene by flicking your hand and switch to the scene prepared in advance.

At the same time, you can use instant messaging tools to chat with others by voice or video. The person on the left is doing a video chat and has added various special effects to himself. You can also do things with many people, all of which are done in a virtual scene. Not only do you have the image of a big-headed doll, but when you communicate with others, you can choose to use the image of an avatar or your own real selfie.

The second one is the camera special effects function, which is now open as a development tool. You can download it and call the interface to achieve the effect of augmented reality on the camera. This is an example given by Zuckerberg. In China, it is better than the original. If you use Meitu Xiuxiu, Beauty Camera, Faceu, these are probably very good things for everyone to play with.

The stronger point of Facebook is that it can recognize scenes, depth and surface objects. When you click on the screen, you will find that it will add special effects according to the corresponding scenes and objects, similar to the popular game "Pokemon Go". It can recognize objects. You can copy a cup of coffee next to the object and change the appearance of the coffee. At the same time, a pot of flowers can add clouds, rain, grow taller, bigger, or produce beautiful flowers.

In addition, you can play augmented reality games. Here is an example. When you click on the blanket on the screen, it becomes your territory. You can play a tower defense game. When soldiers come over, you have to keep guarding your tower and firing various cannons. In the camera, you can play tower defense games using augmented reality technology. SDK can also add various special effects to the camera. Now many apps already have them. The significance here is to make special effects into a developer tool. When you are ready to start a business and make an app, or your company can use it. It is easy to add special effects here.

The third one is the very popular machine learning, that is, the very successful result of deep learning, the release of Caffe 2. If you know about deep learning, in the current deep learning network, the most famous one among the existing open networks is Google's TensorFlow, followed by Facebook's Caffe or Torch, and Amazon's MXNet. Caffe and MXNet are both works of Chinese people, and they are the pride of our compatriots. Caffe has always been an open source project of Berkeley and has been used by many people. Recently, after Google TensorFlow became popular, more people use TensorFlow. Facebook has made a lot of revisions to Caffe.

On the left is Jia Yangqing, the author of Caffe, and on the right is also a professor in the industry. He and Tian Yuandong (head of the intelligent Go project at Facebook AI Research Institute), plus Amazon MXNet developer Li Mu, are the top three Chinese AI experts. I heard that it took about three months of closed development to release Caffe 2 at this F8.

If you are interested, just search for Caffe 2 online. There is a Github project with open source source code. If you are interested, you can go and look at the source code. The company's homepage can also be searched, it is called Caffe 2.AI, but I don't know if it is too much traffic or something, we can't open this page now. It can be downloaded from Github. The biggest feature is that it supports deep learning on iOS and Android platforms, which means you can do deep learning on mobile devices.

Finally, let me introduce the update of Facebook Messenger. However, since neither Facebook nor Messenger can be used in China, I will go through it quickly. Messenger has more functions, supports more attachments, and supports different content. But compared with WeChat, they are still catching up. In fact, WeChat has done better and is ahead.

Domestic developers are familiar with an open source front-end framework from Facebook called React. React has been rewritten this time and is called React Fiber, which is the rewritten React. If you are interested in the front-end, you can search below to find out where the improvements are and get familiar with it slowly.

Generally speaking, this is what I want to say. From the initial 8-minute video summary to the summary of each key point, I think everyone should have an understanding of this F8.

The following are questions from readers of the Leifeng.com Hard Entrepreneurship Open Class.

Q1: In addition to VR social networking, Zuckerberg also envisioned AR social networking, such as wearing glasses together to play virtual chess. What do you think about this?

Qin Chao : No, if you watch the video carefully, he first introduced wearing glasses to do some things, using glasses to do AR, but then he turned around and said that they thought so a few years ago, but found that using glasses is not a good thing, so they are now focusing on cameras, that is, the camera on your phone, to do augmented reality. He did not talk about playing virtual chess in it. If you play virtual chess with Oculus VR glasses, it is the same as before. Wearing big glasses is a virtual reality, and there is no interaction with the real reality.

Q2: What do you think of the similarities between Camera Effects and Snapchat in some aspects? Will Facebook suppress the development of Snapchat because of this app?

Qin Chao : That’s right. Facebook has many features that imitate Snapchat, and it also admitted that it borrowed many effects from Snapchat. But these are not unique to Snapchat itself. In many areas, Meitu Xiuxiu and Faceu are ahead. In China, people are more interested in beauty, which is ahead of Westerners. So even Snapchat itself is learning from us. In addition, because Facebook and Snapchat are in direct competition, many features are imitating Snapchat, which I won’t talk about. The Story features on Messenger and Instagram are all imitations of Snapchat.

Q3: Is Facebook’s VR strategy basically a failure like Google Glass?

Qin Chao : It’s not that they failed, but one thing is that their current achievements are somewhat different from their initial expectations for VR, which can also explain why he poached Hu Ge from Xiaomi to manage the Oculus team. The difference is that the entire Google Glass project was cancelled, while Oculus is still working on it. It is a long-term investment that will take another three to five years. One thing is that at the F8 conference, many people actually expected the release of new hardware, that is, new VR hardware, but it was not released, probably because the overall development progress was relatively slow.

Q4: What are the differences between VR and AR for Facebook? Will they be connected in the future?

Qin Chao : The technologies of the two should be the same. VR is essentially wearing a pair of big glasses and living in a virtual world. AR allows you to see real things and simulate some enhanced technologies at the same time. For example, when you play Pokemon, you can use a camera to take pictures of objects and get an enhanced effect on the objects.

For Facebook, it means a new battlefield, which can enable more human interactions and bring people closer together. So as long as it can make the world more open and more connected, it is in line with Facebook's long-term vision and Facebook is willing to spend time on it.

Q5: What do you think of Facebook's move towards AR from the camera perspective? Does this also point out the development direction for some domestic manufacturers?

Qin Chao : Based on my own experience working at Facebook, you may have a mythical view of this company. If I were there, I would not know which direction to go, and I was a little confused at times. In addition, the final delivery progress of the project would be pushed back from the initial expected time. This was not only at Facebook, I also had this experience at Google. Almost 100% of the time, the deadline for the project would be delayed, which means that if the project usually takes half a year to complete, it would take one year, multiplied by two.

Many times, some of the products he released are just attempts. It cannot be said that the camera is a direction, so we all start a camera business. So we have to continue to wait and see. Facebook is now putting AR projects on cameras and mobile phone cameras. Let's wait and see what actions it takes in this regard in half a year and whether users are using it more and more.

I think I am relatively optimistic in this regard. In fact, everyone has a mobile phone, and augmented reality is already in various apps, such as Kuaishou and Faceu. When you post a picture to edit it, it is actually basic augmented reality. Later, when I am live streaming, I will add a headdress or a horse head. There is an application called TiKi that is quite popular among the post-00s.

This is a good direction, but it does not mean that you can start a business in this area.

Q6: VR, AR and AI, which one will Facebook pay more attention to?

Qin Chao : Facebook will focus more on AI, while VR and AR are mainly for exploration. So in terms of artificial intelligence, if you have a technical background, especially software engineers, you should be familiar with AI. This is similar to the previous mobile Internet technology, which will become a necessary skill in the future. Google engineers on Udacity have opened a free course for everyone, which talks about deep learning.

Q7: I remember that F8 announced a Surround 360 panoramic camera last year, and it was also open source. It seems that there hasn’t been any major movement since then?

Qin Chao : 360-degree cameras are for professional studios or professional companies that want to make 360-degree videos, not for the general public.

If you want to take 360-degree photos, there are many ways to do it. In China, there are panoramic cameras that you can hold in your hand, or a stick that you can use to take panoramic photos. However, the Facebook hardware is quite complex, consisting of 17 cameras. This is an amateur project of an ordinary engineer at Facebook. He just likes to build this little gadget, so he made such a thing.

Because the hardware is complex and expensive, it will definitely not be used by many people. Its fate in the future remains to be seen. It may be used more by professional teams. I saw the real thing at Facebook at that time. So many cameras can take detailed pictures, which is a bit too much for ordinary consumers.

Q8: Can you predict the development trend of VR, AR, and AI in China this year?

Qin Chao : I have always been conservative about VR and AR. Generally, they are done by large companies. If you are starting a business, it is okay to make content, but it is difficult to make platforms or hardware. For content, you can develop a game yourself, and the game runs very well in VR and AR glasses. For example, the previous game "Temple Run" is very suitable for VR.

You can make other small games or popular games in China into VR games, which is a reliable direction. But if you make a hardware or a platform yourself, it is basically impossible. From our investment perspective, a year or two ago, many teams were working on it, but now they have all come to nothing.

The development trend of AI is undoubtedly the future direction, the direction for five or ten years. If you are a software engineer, you just need to learn it. If you can use these things in your company, at least you don’t have to worry about it. If you are a startup team that wants to do this, the most important thing about AI is not to do general AI technology or general AI platforms. These are not reliable. If you want to do it, you should dig deep into an industry and find out that this industry can use AI to solve problems.

Let me give you an example. In medicine, every doctor needs to look at films. For example, during a physical examination, they will take a film of your lungs to see if your lungs are normal, or take a film of your neck to see if your cervical spine is normal. All films are the same size, and the doctor will see the same things every time. These things can be identified by artificial intelligence. Identify whether you have cervical spondylosis, or see if there are any cancer lesions, and so on.

The second is Taobao customer service, intelligent reply robots, and other things that are repetitive but have complex rules and require certain training to accomplish. All of these can be done with AI later.

Another classic scenario is that when something is released abroad, Chinese knockoff factories often copy it. Here, they will take a picture of the shoes and break down each component, find out which part can be used from which domestic supplier, and put it together. Because the parts in China are all different, there are tens of thousands of parts, so if you take a picture of a pair of shoes, it often takes one person or a team two or three days to find each part from domestic suppliers. In fact, this can be done with AI technology. Take a photo, identify the buttons and accessories on the corresponding shoes, their shapes, materials, and matching, and replace each part of the domestic raw material distributors. In the end, the entire simulated shoe is similar.

I think all similar things can be solved with AI in the future. If you want to start a business, the key is to first understand the business in the vertical segment, and second, find ways to have data. Whether you are a supplier of a hospital or a copycat factory, you have all the data, and data is more important. The technology itself, or how to train, or the training framework, model, and the trained artificial intelligence brain, all these things are open source. On Google and Facebook websites, you can achieve them as long as you follow them. Therefore, the key is the information and data of the vertical industry.

Q9: Facebook spent so much money to acquire Oculus, but now it seems that the product sales are not very good. Will Oculus drag down Facebook's development?

Qin Chao : With my current experience, I cannot give a 100% accurate answer. I personally think that 2 billion is not a lot of money for Facebook, and Facebook will not have any financial pressure. But if there is no big achievement in the next three years from this year, that is, if there is no big achievement in 2020, Facebook may cut the Oculus department. Only then can we look back and see whether Oculus has held Facebook back, and whether it was a correct strategic choice to bet on virtual reality technology at that time.

Q10: Can Facebook Spaces really change our daily social life? But at present, VR hardware is still a threshold, and it seems to be far away from ordinary people like us.

Qin Chao : I think it can be changed. You think VR hardware is a threshold because you only see the most expensive ones. But in fact, you can buy cheap VR glasses online now, and do similar things, such as Samsung Gear VR, which costs a few thousand yuan when paired with a Samsung phone. This is more affordable, but the problem is that Samsung's sales in China continue to decline, resulting in less use of Gear VR. If Huawei releases this kind of VR kit in the future, and sells it for only 200 yuan, the cost price, VR may rise all of a sudden.

I had a friend who had a Gear VR, so I tried it out. It was very simple to embed a phone into the Gear VR. It didn’t change your usual usage habits, so it was easy to use. Even VR apps, as long as you put your phone into the Gear VR, will display VR content.

Of course, there is a third thing, which is already widely used in China, which is Cardboard. This Cardboard costs more than 20 yuan. If you want to watch movies with your girlfriend on your phone or iPad before going to bed and you are tired, you can buy two and wear them. Two phones can be used at the same time, and the effect is also good. For example, when watching "In the Name of People".

If your video supports VR devices, you will have a good sense of immersion. But if it is just a normal video, it is also OK. There is a player in Cardboard, which makes you feel like you are sitting in a movie theater, and there is a relatively large screen in front of you. This screen is of course a mobile phone screen, with a slightly curved effect. If you turn off the lights in the bedroom, it is no less than watching IMAX.