Technology

&Yeah! Well of course we&re working on it,& Facebook head of augmented reality Ficus Kirkpatrick told me when I asked him at TechCrunchAR/VR event in LA if Facebook was building AR glasses. &We are building hardware products. We&re going forward on this . . . We want to see those glasses come into reality, and I think we want to play our part in helping to bring them there.&

This is the clearest confirmation we&ve received yet from Facebook about its plans for AR glasses. The product could be Facebookopportunity to own a mainstream computing device on which its software could run after a decade of being beholden to smartphones built, controlled and taxed by Apple and Google.

This month, Facebook launched its first self-branded gadget out of its Building 8 lab, the Portal smart display, and now itrevving up hardware efforts. For AR, Kirkpatrick told me, &We have no product to announce right now. But we have a lot of very talented people doing really, really compelling cutting-edge research that we hope plays a part in the future of headsets.&

Therea war brewing here. AR startups like Magic Leap and Thalmic Labs are starting to release their first headsets and glasses. Microsoft is considered a leader thanks to its early HoloLens product, while Google Glass is still being developed for the enterprise. And Apple has acquired AR hardware developers like Akonia Holographicsand Vrvanato accelerate development of its own headsets.

Mark Zuckerberg said at F8 2017 that AR glasses were 5 to 7 years away

Technological progress and competition seems to have sped up Facebooktimetable. Back in April 2017, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, &We all know where we want this to get eventually, we want glasses,& but explained that &we do not have the science or technology today to build the AR glasses that we want. We may in five years, or seven years.& He explained that &We can&t build the AR product that we want today, so building VR is the path to getting to those AR glasses.& The companyOculus division had talked extensively about the potential of AR glasses, yet similarly characterized them as far off.

But a few months later, a Facebook patent application for AR glasses was spotted by Business Insider that detailed using &waveguide display with two-dimensional scanner& to project media onto the lenses. CheddarAlex Heath reports that Facebook is working on Project Sequoia that uses projectors to display AR experiences on top of physical objects like a chess board on a table or a personlikeness on something for teleconferencing. These indicate Facebook was moving past AR research.

Facebook AR glasses patent application

Last month, The Information spotted four Facebook job listings seekingengineers with experience building custom AR computer chips to join the Facebook Reality Lab (formerly known as Oculus research).And a week later, Oculus& Chief Scientist Michael Abrash briefly mentioned amidst a half-hour technical keynote at the companyVR conference that &No off the shelf display technology is good enough for AR, so we had no choice but to develop a new display system. And that system also has the potential to bring VR to a different level.&

But Kirkpatrick clarified that he sees FacebookAR efforts not just as a mixed reality feature of VR headsets. &I don&t think we converge to one single device . . . I don&t think we&re going to end up in a Ready Player One future where everyone is just hanging out in VR all the time,& he tells me. &I think we&re still going to have the lives that we have today where you stay at home and you have maybe an escapist, immersive experience or you use VR to transport yourself somewhere else. But I think those things like the people you connect with, the things you&re doing, the state of your apps and everything needs to be carried and portable on-the-go with you as well, and I think thatgoing to look more like how we think about AR.&

Oculus Chief Scientist Michael Abrash makes predictions about the future of AR and VR at the Oculus Connect 5 conference

Oculus virtual reality headsets and Facebook augmented reality glasses could share an underlying software layer, though, which might speed up engineering efforts while making the interface more familiar for users. &I think that all this stuff will converge in some way maybe at the software level,& Kirkpatrick said.

The problem for Facebook AR is that it may run into the same privacy concerns that people had about putting a Portal camera inside their homes. While VR headsets generate a fictional world, AR must collect data about your real-world surroundings. That could raise fears about Facebook surveilling not just our homes but everything we do, and using that data to power ad targeting and content recommendations. This brand tax haunts Facebookevery move.

Startups with a cleaner slate like Magic Leap and giants with a better track record on privacy like Apple could have an easier time getting users to put a camera on their heads. Facebook would likely need a best-in-class gadget that does much that others can&t in order to convince people it deserves to augment their reality.

You can watch our full interview with Facebookdirector of camera and head of augmented reality engineering Ficus Kirkpatrick from our TechCrunch Sessions: AR/VR event in LA:

Tesla reported a profit in the third quarter, reversing seven consecutive quarters of losses. It is only the third time in its history that it has achieved this milestone. The third quarter earnings, which were reported after the market closed Wednesday, rocketed shares up nearly 12 percent to above $320.

Tesla reported a profit of $312 million attributed to common shareholders in the three months that ended on September 30, compared with a $619 million loss in the same period last year.

Tesla has had just two profitable quarters in its history, the last of which was reported in 2016. The turnaround at the company was driven by sales of the Model 3, the electric vehicle on which the company and its CEO Elon Musk has placed a considerable bet.

Tesla struck a bullish tone in its letter to shareholders forecasting that the total market potential for Model 3 is larger than just the premium sedan market. The company said customers are trading up their relatively cheaper vehicles to buy a Model 3, even though there is not yet a leasing option and the Q3 starting price of a Model 3 was $49,000.

The company still has yet to introduce a $35,000 Model 3, its initial target price. The cheapest variant of the Model 3 is a mid-range version that has a 260-mile EPA estimated range and a starting price of $46,000. (That price was $45,000 just a week ago and has since been adjusted upwards.) Tesla said it&working hard& to bring down the price of Model 3 to $35,000, adding that better than expected Model 3 cost reduction is allowing it to bring more affordable options to the market sooner.

A cheaper Model 3 will maker it harder for Tesla to sustain profits over the long term. That kind of pressure might not unfold in the fourth quarter, but it could eventually come to pass unless Tesla further reduces costs. And even itsuccessful, there are bills to pay. Tesla reported $3.5 billion in accounts payable. It has more than $10 billion in debt.

One future bright spot is that the Model 3 is only sold in the U.S. and Canada. Tesla said it will begin taking Model 3 orders for customers Europe and China before the end of the year, allowing the company to tap a larger customer base.

When adjusted for one-time items, Tesla earned $516 million, or $2.90 per share, compared with a loss of $488 million, or $2.92 a share (loss), in the same period last year.

Teslathird-quarter earnings showed the company has a free cash flow of about $881 million compared with a negative free cash flow of $1.416 billion in the same period last year.Free cash flow is the amount of cash a company makes after accounting for capital expenditures.

The company total cash increased by $731 million to end the third quarter with $3 billion.

Tesla reported stunning sales of $6.8 billion in the third quarter, more than doubling its revenues of $2.98 billion in the same quarter last year, driven by Model 3 deliveries. Tesla reported sales of $4 billion in the second quarter of this year.

Teslaautomotive gross margin increased to 25.8 percent under generally accepted accounting principles. The companyGAAP automotive gross margin was 18.3 percent in the same period last year.

Teslareported October 2 that it delivered 83,500 electric vehicles in the third quarter, more than double from the previous period as the company steered byMuskpulled out all the stops to get its newest sedan, the Model 3, to customers.

The company said Wednesday it delivered 56,065 Model 3 sedans, up from18,440 in the previous quarter, which was within its own guidance.

If your Instagram followers aren&t aware that you&ve voted, did you really even vote

In 2018, the act of voting is great social media fodder. People want their friends to know they&ve registered to vote, or that they&ve just mailed in their absentee ballot or even that they&ve bought some sort of &look, I voted& t-shirt.These announcements are being shared across social platforms like ita required part of the voting process.

Whether or not those people only voted for the likes doesn&t really matter, the important thing is that they voted. Social media, because of the unprecedented access it grants people to the lives of their peers and influencers, is an effective strategy of pushing eligible voters to the polls. Why Because people care about their friends and often even more about what their friends think of them. No one wants to be that friend that didn&t vote.

Vote.organdOutvote, a texting app for political campaigns, have taken note. The nonprofit platform for voter registration, information and advocacy has teamed up with the Y Combinator graduate to launch a new nonpartisan social media app that syncs with a useraddress book to help them quickly and efficiently remind their friends to check their registration status, find their polling place location and vote.

According to Outvoteresearch, one text message from a known contact made people 10 percent more likely to vote versus 8 percent from a typical conversation with a political canvasser. Using the app, you can essentially perform 2 hours of canvassing in 5 minutes, from the comfort of your own bed.

&This November, reminding your friends is your new civic duty,& Outvote co-founder Naseem Makiya said in a statement.

Outvoteflagship app is tailored for Democrats and is meant to inspire and personalize grassroots-style campaigning. Using that app, you can send messages to your friends using Facebook Messenger, too, though the app doesn&t sync with any contacts outside of your phoneaddress book.

In addition to YC backing, Outvote has raised $300,000 in seed funding. The startup was founded byMakiya, formerly of startups Moovweb and DataCamp, as well asNadeem Mazen, the former chief executive officer of a creative agency called Nimblebot.

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Something I wish I knew about when I was 18 and voting for the first time: EARLY VOTING . It makes it so quick and easy to go and cast your vote before November 6. Early voting starts TODAY in Tennessee and goes to Nov 1 You can check out your stateearly voting dates at the link in my bio

A post shared by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Oct 17, 2018 at 6:02am PDT

Axios reported earlier today that while TV and email campaigns are still used by political campaigns, text messaging has proven to be a whole lot more successful. Per Opn Sesame,90 percent of text messages are read within 5 minutes: &That intimate delivery, and the ability to target and personalize messages, is what makes them so effective for campaigns — but also annoying for many voters who didn&t sign up for them,& Axios& Kim Hart wrote.

Social media companies, other avenues for targeted and personalized messaging, have stepped up their voter education efforts ahead of the midterm elections.

Snap announced yesterday that after adding a vote button to its app, more than 400,000 of its users registered to vote via TurboVote. Meanwhile,Facebook and Twitter have added small reminders to their feeds, as have Reddit, Tinder, Bumble, Lyft and several other big tech companies.

Instagram, for its part, has Taylor Swift. Her recent social media campaign, beginning with a postearlier this month prodding her fans to vote, caused a big spike in voter registrations. According to Vote.org, 65,000 people registered to vote in the 24-hour period that followed her first-ever politically fueled gram.

Since then, Swift has been sharing on her Instagram story images of her fans who voted. Ither reward to those who followed her advice to express their political opinions.

So vote, and you may be featured on a pop starInstagram. That2018 for you.