Facebook’s F8 developer conference 2017

Facebook is betting big on augmented reality, and the technology — which overlays digital text and objects on the real world through a lens — was the major theme of the company’s annual F8 developer conference this week.

Facebook’s announcements were bold, futuristic and, at times, a little hard to piece together.

“What if you could type directly from your brain?”

That was the question Facebook executive Regina Dugan, who runs the company’s secretive research and hardware lab Building 8, posed to the audience Wednesday at the company’s annual F8 developer conference in San Jose.

Ever since Facebook bought Oculus Rift for $2 billion, the company has been seeding the VR industry with money and technology to help generate content that might encourage people to give VR a try.

Facebook’s most recent effort: A new video camera built specifically to record 360-degree videos, the kind of videos that work well inside a VR headset. Facebook unveiled the camera at its annual F8 developer conference on Wednesday.

Facebook thinks it can do more to help in times of crisis.

The social giant already offers a feature called Safety Check, which lets users mark themselves safe during a crisis or connect with other users who might have food, clothing or shelter on hand during a natural disaster.

Facebook’s theme of the day on Tuesday: Alternate realities.

The social giant hosted thousands of developers in San Jose Tuesday for the first day of F8, its annual developer conference.

Virtual reality is often a solo experience — you throw on a headset, plug in some headphones and tune out the world while you play a game or watch a movie.

Facebook thinks it can make make VR more social, and now it has an actual product so people can spend time with other real people in a virtual world.

It’s been one year since Facebook Messenger first unveiled its bot platform in the hope that brands and retailers would use the app to automate messaging conversations with their customers.

Since then, developers have created tens of thousands of chat bots — they just aren’t very easy to find.

Mark Zuckerberg has a vision for the future, and it involves a lot less stuff.

“Think about how many of the things you use [that] don’t actually need to be physical,” Zuckerberg, Facebook’s future-forming, 32-year-old CEO, said from his all-glass office last week at Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will give his keynote address at the company’s annual F8 developer conference today at 10am PT, 1pm ET.

The conference is in San Jose, Calif., but you don’t need to be in attendance to hear Zuckerberg lay out his plans for Facebook — the company is streaming the keynote online right here.