Meta Breaks Up 300-person VR / AR OS Team
According to a report by The Information, Meta has broken up the team of 300 people working on an OS for AR and VR headsets. Some of the engineers have been moved to teams working on AR glasses and Oculus (er, Quest) headsets. This comes after recent reports – which Meta denied at the time – that the company had halted work on the team’s project creating a unified custom operating system for its VR and AR headsets.
In January, reports surfaced that Meta had canceled the “XROS” project the team was working on. After the reports came out, Reality Labs Vice President Gabriel Aul tweeted that the company was still growing and hiring new employees, and included a link to the Meta careers page. Aul also said that the company is still working on a specialized OS for their devices.
Meta is planning to “speed up the development of solutions that are tailored for each product line” by “embedding more OS engineers directly into [its] AR and VR teams,” according to a statement emailed to The Verge on Friday. This suggests that Meta’s current approach prioritizes each team’s customizations for its own projects, instead of a centralized team and new software platform.
According to The Information, some engineers from the XROS team will work on AR glasses, Quest VR headsets, and other XR technology that involves hand- and eye-tracking through computer vision. It is not clear where every employee from the XROS team will end up.
Meta is changing its image. For example, it changed its name to signify a focus on the “metaverse.” Meta also updated its values. Employees should “move fast together” and “focus on long term impact.”
Right now, headsets like the Oculus Quest 2 use an operating system based on Android. It’s not clear yet what future headsets will use, but it seems unlikely that we’ll see a brand-new OS when Meta releases their next generation of VR headsets.
Statement from Meta spokesperson Sheeva Slovan:
We are always evolving our team structures to help us bring great products to market quickly. By embedding more OS engineers directly into our AR and VR teams, we can speed up the development of solutions that are hyper-tuned for each product line. As we’ve said before, there are several technical directions we’re pursuing to build these and we remain committed to building highly specialized systems. We continue to invest and optimize to move fast so we can deliver against the aggressive goals we’ve set.
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