Facebook, and more specifically Mark Zuckerburg, have been a grumpy bunch ever since Apple and Google beat them to being embedded into everyone’s digital lives through the smartphone. However, Zuckerburg has revealed that Facebook are in a position to be the mainstream augmented reality platform.

What does that even mean?!

Well, in simpler terms, you know how Facebook have started putting up those ‘My Day’ things on Messenger and how Instagram is slowly starting to turn into Snapchat? That’s because Facebook, who owns all of those companies except for Snapchat, have slowly been positioning themselves in a way for their users to digitally manipulate the physical world around them through their smartphone lens.

Zuckerburg has said in an interview:

“Think about how many of the things around us don’t actually need to be physical,”

“Instead of a $500 TV sitting in front of us, what’s to keep us from one day having it be a $1 app?”

Clearly, he’s got big ideas and isn’t afraid to put them into practice. It’s been a work in progress over the last 18 months. This is thanks to the focus on how users can use the camera to communicate with their friends on the variety of platforms that Facebook owns.

It appears that popular gif app Giphy is already on board, with the introduction of Gipy Thoughts. This allows users to attach cartoon thought bubbles above the heads of people that they see through their Facebook camera lens.

The director of business development at Giphy, David Rosenberg, has said that:

“It goes back to creative expression,”

“Facebook Camera is just going to be this massive audience of people ready to make deeply personal content they can share with their friends.”

Sounds pretty cool, even if it’s not out for a while.