What is ocean?

Ocean is a toolkit that Facebook's research team built to help developers create computer vision and augmented reality applications. Think of it as a foundational library, like a collection of specialized tools, that handles the heavy lifting of tasks like image processing, motion tracking, and real-world scene understanding. Instead of building these capabilities from scratch, developers can use Ocean's pre-made components to speed up their projects. The framework is written in C++, a programming language known for being fast and efficient. This matters because computer vision and AR work is computationally demanding, processing video feeds in real time or recognizing objects in images requires a lot of computing power. By using C++, Ocean can squeeze out maximum performance on a wide range of devices: phones (Android and iOS), computers (Windows, macOS, Linux), and specialized hardware like Meta Quest headsets. The framework is designed to work across all these platforms without requiring changes to the underlying code, which saves developers significant effort. If you're building an AR app that needs to track a user's hands, or a mobile app that identifies objects in photos, or any tool that processes visual information in real time, Ocean provides the building blocks to make that possible. Meta uses this framework internally for its own products, so it's been tested and refined in real production environments. The framework is open source under the MIT License, meaning anyone can use, modify, and distribute it. Getting started requires some technical setup, you'll need to build Ocean from source code rather than download a ready-to-use version, and you need C++20 compatibility and tools like CMake and Python. The project provides detailed instructions for each platform, but this does mean it's aimed at developers comfortable with building software from source, not non-technical users looking for a plug-and-play solution.