[Editor Charlie sez: Another reason why Facebook needs to stop being a royalty deadbeat and why artists and songwriters need fair treatment from Facebook for their past infringing and future license.]

Zuckerberg hasn’t figured out a way to conjure physical objects out of thin air. Instead he has plans to produce digital objects using software-powered glasses, the kind of futuristic lenses that can overlay digital text and images onto the physical world around you.

The technology, referred to as augmented reality, is already around, though in a much simpler form. It’s the same technology that powers Facebook’s (and Snapchat’s) face-distorting camera lenses, and helped propel Pokémon Go into a cultural phenomenon.

Somewhere down the line, Zuckerberg said, augmented reality will be a big part of Facebook, too. That vision was laid out today at the company’s annual developer conference, F8, in San Jose, Calif., just 20 miles down the road from Facebook’s corporate headquarters.

Facebook doesn’t have AR glasses yet — though Zuckerberg confirmed to Recode that the company is building “AR hardware” — but it’s taking a different step toward bringing augmented reality mainstream: It’s opening up a developer platform so that people can build augmented-reality features for the cameras that live inside Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Whatsapp….“A key part of that journey is making an open platform where any developer can create anything they want,” Zuckerberg added….

When asked what he learned about Glass, Google’s evolving attempt at AR glasses that flopped as a consumer product, Zuckerberg talked about the dangers of moving too quickly.

“They would have agreed too, I’m sure, that they couldn’t build the thing that they wanted to. So they built [Glass] instead and kind of thought that that might be a stepping stone,” he said. “But I think getting the stepping stones right is the art in this.”