Reality Labs, Meta’s XR division formed in 2020, is now being reorganized into two distinct groups, ‘Wearables’ and ‘Metaverse’, which reportedly comes along a “relatively small” number of layoffs.
As reported by The Verge’s Alex Heath, Meta CTO and head of Reality Labs Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth announced the reorg in an internal memo to employees, stating that all teams in Reality Labs are being merged into either a central ‘Metaverse’ organization, responsible for Quest, and a new ‘Wearables’ organization to dedicated to other hardware, including its Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses.
In the memo, which is available via Heath’s Command Line newsletter, Bosworth says the company’s smartglasses were “a much bigger success than we expected,” spurring the XR division to put more focus on the product.
Image courtesy Meta, Ray-Ban
“We have the leading AI device on the market right now, and we are doubling down on finding a strong product market fit for wearable Meta AI, building a business around it, and expanding the audience,” Bosworth’s memo reads. “Our north star to overlay digital content seamlessly onto the physical world remains the same, but the steps on that path just got a lot more exciting.”
Notably, Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses don’t include displays of any type, AR or otherwise, instead offering input through voice assistant and touch on the glasses’ struts for things like taking pictures, videos, and listening to music. In late 2023, Meta also added AI-powered object recognition.
As for its Quest-related efforts, Bosworth says the company is still “deeply committed to investing in Horizon as the core foundation of our social, spatial Horizon OS, and high-quality experiences for both mixed reality and mobile.”
Meta announced in April it will soon license its Horizon OS (ex-Quest OS) to third parties for the first time, including ASUS, Lenovo and Xbox. This comes part and parcel with it Horizon Store (ex-Quest Store) content library—seen as a bid to become a more prolific alternative to Apple’s Vision Pro.
“The org chart doesn’t primarily determine whether we succeed or fail, our execution does,” Bosworth said in the memo. “But by setting it up this way I hope we reduce overhead and allow people across teams to come together and execute with a more unified view of who our customers are and how we can best serve them.”
Meta declined to comment on the exact number of Reality Labs layoffs, however Heath maintains “it’s a relatively small number and focused on teams in Reality Labs where leadership roles are now redundant thanks to this new structure.”
Meta today announced its fourth quarter earnings for 2023, revealing how Reality Labs has fared during the holiday season. It’s been a banner quarter for Meta’s XR division, with Reality Labs posting record revenue numbers, but also record costs.
During its Q4 earnings call, Meta revealed its XR division had crossed over $1 billion in revenue for the first time, but also had its biggest quarter in terms of costs at $5.72 billion, resulting in a quarterly loss of $4.65 billion. This beats the division’s revenue record of $877 million in Q4 2022, and handily beats it’s second largest quarters for costs of operation in Q4 2022, $5.01 billion.
Image created by Road to VR, data courtesy Meta
Meta says its uptick in revenue was primarily driven by Quest 3 sales, its latest VR headset released in October 2023. Undoubtedly some of that record revenue was also supported by Quest 2, which was dropped from $300 to $250 prior to the holiday season, putting the company’s 2020-era headset at half the price of the new Quest 3.
Meta revealed that in addition to strong Quest sales, EssilorLuxottica is set to manufacture more Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses to fulfill continued demand.
Holiday quarters are typically the most performant, and this is absolutely true for Meta’s Reality Labs division, showing over a 47% increase in revenue year-over-year. Here’s a closer look at revenue gains year-over-year:
The company says however we can expect “more meaningful losses” in the coming years, as Meta says it will continue to invest in the XR space. This is largely expected, as the company has been insistent that major investment expenses may not pay off until the 2030s.
We’re still listening in on the earnings call and diving into the particulars, so check back soon as this story is breaking.
Meta’s latest quarterly results show its Reality Labs XR division is again reporting an operating loss just south of $4 billion. Now, for its Q2 2023 results, the company says Reality Labs’ revenue was down by 39% due to lower Quest 2 sales, making for the worst quarterly performance in the past two years.
Meta has been clear about its plan to spend aggressively on XR over the next several years, so it’s again no surprise we’re seeing operating budgets in the billions with only a fraction of that coming back in via Quest 2 hardware and software sales.
In fact, Quest 2 sales play such an important role in Reality Labs’ quarterly performance that Meta has reported $276 million in revenue in Q2 2023, or 39% lower than last quarter.
Image created using data courtesy Meta
Meta reported that Reality Labs expenses were $4 billion, which was up 23% since the same period last year. The company says this was due to lapping a reduction in Reality Labs loss reserves and growth in employee-related costs, bringing the XR division’s operating loss to $3.7 billion for Q2 2023.
Meta says it expects continued operating losses in the future, saying losses will likely “increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in AR/VR and our investments to further scale our ecosystem.”
Meanwhile, the company is preparing to launch Quest 3 in late 2023, the $500 follow-up headset that integrates many of Quest Pro’s mixed reality capabilities. Meta’s $1,000 Quest Pro has also reportedly been discontinued, however (without substantiating that particular claim) Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth implied earlier this month that a Quest Pro 2 isn’t off the table.
Apple’s Vision Pro is also looming, set to launch sometime next year. As rising tides lift all boats, hype around Vision Pro could actually benefit Meta in the short term. Apple’s $3,500 XR headset has attracted new attention to the space, however Meta’s consumer-friendly pricing and extensive game catalogue for Quest 3 may be well positioned this holiday to capitalize on that Apple-adjacent cachet.
Meta announced its latest quarterly results, revealing that the company’s Reality Labs metaverse division is again reporting a loss of nearly $4 billion. The bright side? Meta’s still investing billions into XR, and it’s not showing any signs of stopping.
Meta revealed in its Q1 2023 financial results that its family of apps is now being used by over 3 billion people, an increase of 5% year-over-year, but its metaverse investments are still operating at heavy losses.
Reality Labs is responsible for R&D for its most forward-looking projects, including the Quest virtual reality headset platform, and its work in augmented reality and artificial intelligence. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has warned shareholders in the past that Meta’s XR investments may not flourish until 2030.
Here’s a look at the related income losses and revenue for Reality Labs since it was formed as a distinct entity in Q4 2020:
Image created by Road to VR using data courtesy Meta
Meta reports Reality Labs generated $339 million in revenue during its first quarter of the year, a small fraction of the company’s 28.65 billion quarterly revenue. The bulk of that was generated from its family of apps—Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
While the $3.99 billion loss may show the company is tightening its belt in contrast to Q4 2022, which was at an eye-watering $4.28 billion, Meta says we should still expect those losses to continue to increase year-over-year in 2023.
This follows the company’s second big round of layoffs, the most recent of which this month has affected VR teams at Reality Labs, Downpour Interactive (Onward) and Ready at Dawn (Lone Echo, Echo VR). The company says a third round is due to come in May, which will affect the company’s business groups.
Dubbed by Zuckerberg as the company’s “year of efficiency,” the Meta founder and chief said this during the earning call regarding the company’s layoffs:
“This has been a difficult process. But after this is done, I think we’re going to have a much more stable environment for our employees. For the rest of the year, I expect us to focus on improving our distributed work model, delivering AI tools to improve productivity, and removing unnecessary processes across the company.”
Beyond its investment in AI, Zuckerberg says the recent characterization claiming the company has somehow moved away from focusing on the metaverse is “not accurate.”
“We’ve been focusing on both AI and the metaverse for years now, and we will continue to focus on both,” Zuckerberg says, noting that breakthroughs in both areas are essentially shared, such as computer vision, procedurally generated virtual worlds, and its work on AR glasses.
Notably, Zuckerberg says the number of titles in the Quest store with at least $25 million in revenue has doubled since last year, with more than half of Quest daily actives now spend more than an hour using their device.
The company previously confirmed a Quest 3 headset is set to release this year, which is said to be slightly pricier than the $400 Quest 2 headset with features “designed to appeal to VR enthusiasts.”
Meta presented two prototype headsets each solving a different aspect of its goal to make VR “indistinguishable from reality”.
Neither is a practical device intended to be made into a product. Instead they simply demonstrate the effect & feeling of maxing out each of these aspects of VR display systems.
Butterscotch: Retinal Resolution
‘Retinal’ or “retina” is a term often used to describe angular resolution which at least matches that of the human eye. The generally accepted threshold is 60 pixels per degree. No consumer VR headset yet comes close to this – Quest 2 reaches around 20 pixels per degree, while the $1990 Varjo Aero reaches 35 pixels per degree. Varjo’s $5500 business-focused headsets surpass retinal resolution, but only in a tiny area in the center of your view.
Butterscotch is a research prototype achieving 55 pixels per degree. Achieving this required more than just a higher resolution display – Meta says it developed “a new hybrid lens that would fully resolve higher resolution”. CEO Mark Zuckerberg first teased what appears to be Butterscotch back in October.
The downside of Butterscotch is it has a very narrow field of view – only half that of Quest 2. Meta says it’s also heavy and bulky. The purpose of Butterscotch is to demonstrate and research the feeling of retinal resolution, not to be a practical product.
Starburst: Ultra Bright HDR
Starburst is a prototype headset demonstrating extremely bright displays with high dynamic range (HDR). Zuckerberg described bright HDR as “arguably the most important dimension of all” of reaching VR indistinguishable from reality.
Luminance is measured in nits. A traditional 60-watt incandescent bulb reaches around 250 nits, and a high end HDR TV reaches around 1000 nits. But the brightness outdoors dwarfs these numbers – the ambient brightness on a clear sunny day is tens of thousands of nits and direct sunlight is over 1 billion nits (hence why you shouldn’t look at it).
Today’s Quest 2 reaches just 100 nits. Meta says Starburst reaches 20,000 nits and describes it as “one of the brightest HDR displays yet built”.
Starburst is bulky, heavy, and tethered. Zuckerberg admitted it would be “wildly impractical” to ship in a product – “we’re using it to test and for further studies so we can get a sense of what the experience feels like”.
The only known headset with HDR displays is PlayStation VR2, but Sony hasn’t yet revealed the headset’s brightness.
Meta is building a prototype headset called ‘Mirror Lake’ to prove out “nearly all of the advanced visual technologies that we’ve been incubating over the past seven years” in a compact form factor.
Mirror Lake hasn’t yet been built into a functional device – it’s still just a concept being actively worked on. Chief Scientist of Meta’s Reality Labs division Michael Abrash said Mirror Lake “shows what a complete next gen display system could look like”. Back in 2019 Abrash announced Facebook was building a “true next generation concept prototype” VR headset, but it’s unclear what happened to that idea.
The concept is designed to achieve a “ski goggles like form factor” with what Meta calls Holocake lenses, while incorporating advanced eye tracking, variable focus, reverse passthrough, and support for prescription lens attachments “to eliminate the need for eyeglasses”.
To be clear, Mirror Lake is not a product. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested the technology it proves out could be seen in products “in the second half of the decade”.
Varifocal
All current VR headsets, outside of lab prototypes, have fixed focus lenses. Each eye gets a separate image, but the images are focused at a fixed distance. Your eyes will point (converge or diverge) towards the virtual object you’re looking at, but can’t properly focus (accommodate) to this distance. This is called the vergence-accommodation conflict. It causes eye strain and can make virtual objects look blurry close up.
At its F8 conference in 2018 Facebook showed off a prototype headset called Half Dome, which incorporated eye tracking to mechanically move the displays forward or back to adjust focus. Half Dome solved the vergence-accommodation conflict but the mechanical approach would present serious reliability problems in the real world, making it unsuitable to be shipped in products.
At Oculus Connect 6 in 2019 Facebook described Half Dome 2 and Half Dome 3. Half Dome 2 used more reliable actuators and a more compact (but lower field of view) design. Half Dome 3 however took a completely new approach with no moving parts. Instead of moving the display, Half Dome 3 uses a stack of liquid crystal lens layers. Applying a voltage to each lens layer changes its focal length, so each unique combination of on and off results in a different focus distance. With 6 layers, there are 64 different possible focus distances.
While Half Dome 3 is more compact than its predecessors, it’s still much larger than the “ski goggles like” form factor Meta wants to achieve. Mirror Lake will use the same approach as Half Dome 3 but in a significantly smaller form factor, achieved through the use of “Holocake” lenses.
Holocake Lenses
Popular current VR headsets including Quest 2, PlayStation VR, and Valve Index use regular refractive lenses, which necessitate a relatively large display panel and a large gap between it and the lens. This gap is the primary driver of the size and bulk of today’s headsets.
In 2015 eMagin showed an extremely compact prototype HMD design using what are called “pancake lenses”. Pancake lenses use polarization to “fold” the optical path, making it much shorter. Last year HTC shipped Vive Flow, a compact USB powered headset using pancake lenses. Meta’s “high end” headset launching later this year, still only referred to as Project Cambria, will use pancake lenses to achieve a slimmer visor than Quest 2.
With Pancake lenses the optical path is short enough that most of the remaining thickness is the lens itself. To reduce the size of headsets even further, Meta’s researchers kept the same core concepts of pancake optics – polarization based optical folding – but replaced the curved lens with “a thin, flat holographic lens”, building on research they showed off in 2020. Meta calls the result “Holocake” lenses. To be clear, Meta uses the term “holographic” differently than some others in the industry – this is holographic as in holographic film, not a 3D light field display.
Meta says a “very thin prescription attachment” can be added to holocake lenses for those with reduced vision, eliminating the need to wear glasses inside the headset.
While Mirror Lake is still a concept, Meta has already built out a working prototype headset using holocake lenses called Holocake 2. Meta says Holocake 2 is a fully functional PC VR headset, capable of playing any PC VR title. It calls Holocake 2 “the thinnest and lightest VR headset we’ve ever made”, and its researchers believe further miniaturization is possible. In October Meta’s CTO Tweeted an image of himself wearing what looks like Holocake 2.
Holocake lenses have an important limitation – they require specialized lasers as the light source. LED backlights aren’t suitable. Meta’s Michael Abrash noted that lasers aren’t yet available at the performance, size, and price needed for consumer products. Using lasers does however enable a much wider color gamut, Meta claims.
Reverse Passthrough
One roadblock to mass adoption of opaque virtual and mixed reality headsets could be that others in the room can’t see your upper face & eyes. While high quality color passthrough will let you see them, they can’t fully see you.
Last year Meta researchers presented a prototype of “reverse passthrough” – a headset with external LCD panels rendering a plausible view of the wearer’s eyes. Mirror Lake will be the first fully integrated Meta prototype to feature reverse passthrough.
Interestingly, a report last month from The Information claims Apple’s upcoming headset will incorporate reverse passthrough, but adding the screens apparently meant the outward facing cameras had to be placed in “awkward” positions far away from where the user’s eyes would be, making the development of passthrough reprojection algorithms more difficult.
Every so often Meta hosts an “Inside the Lab” roundtable where it showcases early technology it’s currently working on, usually on a very specific research field. Today’s was Inside the Lab: Passing the Visual Turing Test focusing on a very important part of a virtual reality (VR) headset’s hardware, the display. Trying to tackle a range of challenges, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Scientist of Reality Labs, Michael Abrash and several others unveiled three prototype headsets currently being developed.
Meta – Butterscotch Prototype. Image credit: Meta
Prototyping quite often relies on trying to solve a singular problem, be that resolution, weight, size, durability, clarity or any number of other issues. Whilst the Meta Quest 2 does offer a good VR experience, it’s by no means perfect, with areas that can always be improved upon.
Butterscotch
Ensuring a user’s eye sees the best image possible is of utmost importance and Meta is trying to solve that in a number of ways. The first VR prototype shown was Butterscotch, looking like a heavily modded Oculus Rift.
This was built to address VR resolution, more specifically providing retinal resolution in VR. With 60 pixels per degree (ppd) being the benchmark – one which TVs and mobile phones have long surpassed – so that the headset can depict the 20/20 line on an eye chart. “This is the latest of our retinal resolution prototypes, and it gets us to near retinal resolution in VR — 55 pixels per degree. And that’s two and a half times the resolution of Quest 2,” says Abrash on Butterscotch.
While you might expect this to have been achieved via a new panel this wasn’t the case because: “there are currently no display panels that support anything close to retinal resolution for the full field of view of VR headsets today,” Abrash continues. “So what the Butterscotch team did was they shrank the field of view to about half that of a Quest 2 and developed a new hybrid lens that would fully resolve the higher resolution.”
Meta Reality Labs Eye Chart Comparison. Image credit: Meta
As you can see from the above images, Butterscotch does achieve excellent clarity but it’s still a bulky, far from a finished prototype.
Starburst
Even bigger and bulkier than Butterscotch is Starburst. With fans on the top and a pair of side handles, Starburst is Reality Labs’ prototype HDR VR headset. Yes, you read that right, this is what High Dynamic Range in a VR headset currently looks like.
HDR will be a crucial addition as it helps to increase that sense of realism and depth to an image. To do this VR headsets need lots of light to play with, with brightness referred to as nits. Meta’s peak brightness goal is 10,000 nits but as TVs have yet to achieve this number – Samsung’s 65Q9 range can hit 2,000 nits in HDR – that goal is still a way off. When it comes to current VR levels the Quest 2 maxes out at 100 nits.
Meta – Starburst Research Prototype. Image credit: Meta
Packed into the Starburst prototype is a bright lamp behind the LCD panels. This helps Starburst reach an impressive 20,000 nits, creating what is likely one of the first 3D HDR VR displays. You probably wouldn’t want to use it for long though: “to be clear, [Starburst is] wildly impractical in this first generation for anything that you’d actually ship in a product. But we’re using it to test and for further studies so we can get a sense of what the experience feels like,” says Zuckerberg.
Holocake 2
As the last two headset prototypes look many years away how about something which looks slightly more production-ready. Described by Zuckerberg as: “the thinnest and lightest VR headset that we’ve ever built,” the Holocake 2 certainly looks the part of a futuristic device and it’s already capable of running PC VR games!
That might be impressive in a prototype headset but what’s even more remarkable is Holocake 2’s thin profile. VR headsets are thick because the displays and lenses need to be a certain distance apart so that your eyes can properly focus on the imagery. To achieve this slim design Meta has developed two new technologies; a flat holographic lens and polarized reflection.
Meta – Holocake 2 Research Prototype. Image credit: Meta
When it comes to the holographic lens Zuckerberg explains: “Holographs are basically recordings of what happens when light hits something. So just like a holograph is much flatter than the thing itself, holographic optics are much flatter than the lenses that they model, but they affect incoming light in pretty much the same way. So it’s a pretty neat hack.”
As for the polarized reflection, this method of optical folding reduces the space between the display panel and the lens. Both of these technologies have been combined with specialized lasers rather than LEDs as the light source. There’s only one problem, finding a laser with the performant size and price that you need for consumer VR headsets. “We’ll need to do a lot of engineering to achieve a consumer viable laser that meets our specs — that’s safe, low-cost, and efficient and that can fit in a slim VR headset,” Abrash notes. “As of today, the jury is still out on finding a suitable laser source.”
Meta Reality Labs Lens Comparison. Image credit: Meta
If any of these prototypes look familiar its because Butterscotch and Holocake were teased by Zuckerberg and CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth in 2021. No sign of the Meta Quest prototype previously mentioned.
Mirror Lake
Finally, there’s Mirror Lake. This isn’t even a prototype at this stage merely a research concept the Display Systems Research (DSR) team at Reality Labs rustled up. This is pie-in-the-sky thinking, coming up with a ski goggle-like form factor combining all the varifocal (Half-Dome) and eye-tracking and other tech Reality Labs has been working on.
Meta – Mirror Lake concept. Image credit: Meta
And there you have it, all the prototype VR headsets Meta has currently revealed and the challenges it’s trying to solve. While Holocake 2 might be on the near horizon the next headset from Meta is Project Cambria, expected to arrive later this year. For continued updates on the latest Meta VR devices, keep reading gmw3.
Meta says its ultimate goal with its VR hardware is to make a comfortable, compact headset with visual finality that’s ‘indistinguishable from reality’. Today the company revealed its latest VR headset prototypes which it says represent steps toward that goal.
Meta has made it no secret that it’s dumping tens of billions of dollars in its XR efforts, much of which is going to long-term R&D through its Reality Labs Research division. Apparently in an effort to shine a bit of light onto what that money is actually accomplishing, the company invited a group of press to sit down for a look at its latest accomplishments in VR hardware R&D.
VR headsets today are impressively immersive, but there’s still no question that what you’re looking at is, well… virtual.
Inside of Meta’s Reality Labs Research division, the company uses the term ‘visual Turing Test’ to represent the bar that needs to be met to convince your visual system that what’s inside the headset is actually real. The concept is borrowed from a similar concept which denotes the point at which a human can tell the difference between another human and an artificial intelligence.
For a headset to completely convince your visual system that what’s inside the headset is actually real, Meta says you need a headset that can pass that “visual Turing Test.”
Four Challenges
Zuckerberg and Abrash outlined what they see as four key visual challenges that VR headsets need to solve before the visual Turing Test can be passed: varifocal, distortion, retina resolution, and HDR.
Briefly, here’s what those mean:
Varifocal: the ability to focus on arbitrary depths of the virtual scene, with both essential focus functions of the eyes (vergence and accommodation)
Distortion: lenses inherently distort the light that passes through them, often creating artifacts like color separation and pupil swim that make the existence of the lens obvious.
Retina resolution: having enough resolution in the display to meet or exceed the resolving power of the human eye, such that there’s no evidence of underlying pixels
HDR: also known as high dynamic range, which describes the range of darkness and brightness that we experience in the real world (which almost no display today can properly emulate).
The Display Systems Research team at Reality Labs has built prototypes that function as proof-of-concepts for potential solutions to these challenges.
Varifocal
Image courtesy Meta
To address varifocal, the team developed a series of prototypes which it called ‘Half Dome’. In that series the company first explored a varifocal design which used a mechanically moving display to change the distance between the display and the lens, thus changing the focal depth of the image. Later the team moved to a solid-state electronic system which resulted in varifocal optics that were significantly more compact, reliable, and silent. We’ve covered the Half Dome prototypes in greater detail here if you want to know more.
Virtual Reality… For Lenses
As for distortion, Abrash explained that experimenting with lens designs and distortion-correction algorithms that are specific to those lens designs is a cumbersome process. Novel lenses can’t be made quickly, he said, and once they are made they still need to be carefully integrated into a headset.
To allow the Display Systems Research team to work more quickly on the issue, the team built a ‘distortion simulator’, which actually emulates a VR headset using a 3DTV, and simulates lenses (and their corresponding distortion-correction algorithms) in-software.
Image courtesy Meta
Doing so has allowed the team to iterate on the problem more quickly, wherein the key challenge is to dynamically correct lens distortions as the eye moves, rather than merely correcting for what is seen when the eye is looking in the immediate center of the lens.
Retina Resolution
Image courtesy Meta
On the retina resolution front, Meta revealed a previously unseen headset prototype called Butterscotch, which the company says achieves a retina resolution of 60 pixels per degree, allowing for 20/20 vision. To do so, they used extremely pixel-dense displays and reduced the field-of-view—in order to concentrate the pixels over a smaller area—to about half the size of Quest 2. The company says it also developed a “hybrid lens” that would “fully resolve” the increased resolution, and it shared through-the-lens comparisons between the original Rift, Quest 2, and the Butterscotch prototype.
Image courtesy Meta
While there are already headsets out there today that offer retina resolution—like Varjo’s VR-3 headset—only a small area in the middle of the view (27° × 27°) hits the 60 PPD mark… anything outside of that area drops to 30 PPD or lower. Ostensibly Meta’s Butterscotch prototype has 60 PPD across its entirely of the field-of-view, though the company didn’t explain to what extent resolution is reduced toward the edges of the lens.
A new report from The Verge claims that Meta’s Reality Labs division comprises of over 17,000 people.
The report largely deals with the freeze on new hires — first discussed in a report from Reuters last week — as the company reevaluates priorities and cuts back on and postpones select projects. The Verge reports this will affect non-Reality Labs divisions such as those that deal with Facebook Dating, Messenger Kids and more. The Reality Labs-specific changes will be announced soon, according to internal comments from CTO Andrew Bosworth last week, but Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg insist that staff lay-offs are not planned “at this time.”
However, after mentioning that Meta isn’t planing to move staff off Reality Labs and onto other teams, The Verge’s report also makes a passing comment claiming that the Reality Labs division “already totals over 17,000 people.” We reached out to Meta to independently confirm the accuracy of this number, but Meta spokespeople declined to comment.
This means that in just over a year, Meta’s Reality Labs division has made approximately 7,000 new hires. According to Meta, the company hired more engineers in Q1 2022 than they did in all of 2021. As of March 31 2022, Meta’s total employee headcount was 77,805 — up from 58,604 at the same point in 2021. The 17,000 people working at Reality Labs specifically then equates to 21% of the entire company — 4% higher than a year ago.
Meta is cutting back or postponing some projects in its Reality Labs division and halting hiring for some positions.
Reuters first reported earlier this week that Meta’s Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth broke the news to Reality Labs staff in a weekly Q&A session, according to a summary of his comments viewed by Reuters, with more specific changes to be announced within the week. We independently reached out to Meta about the report, and a spokesperson reiterated to UploadVR they’re “evaluating key priorities,” not planning layoffs “at this time,” and “so far, Meta has hired more engineers in Q1 than all of 2021.”
While Meta isn’t alone among platform-building tech companies that seem to be preparing to weather a “market downturn“, Zuckerberg’s investment in realizing VR and AR technology remains significant and we’ll be curious to see how the company focuses its efforts going forward. In June, for example, the poorly rated Venues app will disappear as events move inside Meta’s broader Horizon Worlds effort.
