Meta has reportedly broken up the 300-person team that was building a hybrid OS for AR and VR devices. Now, separate teams will work on OS customizations for their own projects.
Meta has reportedly dissolved a team of around 300 employees tasked with developing hybrid operating systems for AR and VR devices. According to sources cited by The Information, some of the engineers will move to neighboring teams working on Quest headsets and upcoming AR glasses.
In January, it was already reported that Meta had canceled its project codenamed XROS – a new operating system that would have powered both company's VR and AR devices. However, the company denied this information at the time with Meta VP Gabriel Aul commenting: "We are growing this team, not shrinking it", proving a link to the Meta careers page.
This time there was no rebuttal from the company. Meta spokesperson Sheeva Slovan emailed The Verge to comment on the news. She stated that the company currently intends to “speed up the development of solutions that are hyper-tuned for each product line” by “embedding more OS engineers directly into [its] AR and VR teams”.
While the statement does not provide the exact information on the current state of the project or its team, it seems that Meta now focuses on separate company's projects being developed by their own teams, instead of a centralized team working on a new software platform.
The restructuring is presumably caused by Meta implementing the overall image changes as the company focuses on building its metaverse harassing both AR and VR technologies. Currently, Meta's headsets like its Oculus Quest 2 are using Android-based OS, and it is still unclear what software solutions the company's future headsets including the upcoming "Project Cambria" will use.
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