Contrary to what has been stated in recent weeks, Meta would have had a change of plans regarding its virtual and augmented reality devices.
As reported by The Informationwhich cites people aware of the situation, Facebook’s parent company would definitely have discarded the idea of creating their own AR / VR operating system from scratch and would have decided to disband the development team consisting of more than 300 employees who had been working on the project, codenamed XROS, for about four years. Employees on this project would be transferred to other internal tasks, including the development of AR glasses, Quest VR headsets, and other XR technologists involving hand and eye monitoring through computer vision.
Last January, rumors emerged that Meta had canceled the “XROS” project the team was working on (XR is a term used to refer to both augmented and virtual reality). After this news broke, Reality Labs Vice President Gabriel Aul tweeted that the team was instead “growing up” and that the company stood “still working on a highly specialized operating system”.
Oculus VR, its popular headset, has so far been based on Google’s Android operating system and will likely continue to be so in the future. It is likely that Zuckerberg’s company has realized that what Android offers today is even superior to any other proprietary operating system, and perhaps the next AR glasses that have been discussed for some time (Project Aria) will also rely on this platform. .
According to what reported in the quarterly results, Meta’s VR division increased its revenues in the last quarter but also the losses that are far higher: 3.3 billion dollars against 877 million (in the same period of the previous year the figures were 2.09 billion and 717 million respectively). In short, the initiative is still in the red, and demonstrates once more how for the moment it is a long-term investment.
