Meta dismantles the team that was working on an “in-house” AR/VR OS

Only a few weeks after denying the abandonment of the development of an OS for AR / VR, Meta would have completely dismantled the team of more than 300 engineers working on the project. If indeed we are to believe The Information websitewhich was already at the origin of the first leak, so this time Meta would have completely canceled XROS, its in-house operating system project dedicated to mixed reality (VR headset and AR glasses). The decision must not have been easy knowing that Meta had been working on XROS for almost 4 years already!

Also according to The Information, the engineers who worked on XROS have been dispatched to other divisions of the Meta group. Asked about the current situation, Meta responded with a long statement that seems to confirm the band’s abandonment of XROS: “We are constantly evolving our team structure to help us bring great products to market quickly. By integrating more OS engineers directly into our AR and VR teams, we can accelerate the development of hyper-tailored solutions for each product line. As we said before, we follow several technical directions to build them and we remain committed to building highly specialized systems. We continue to invest and optimize in order to act quickly and thus be able to achieve the ambitious objectives that we have set ourselves. »

The next Meta Quest or Cambria headsets should therefore continue to run on a modified version of Android, a default choice which could well in the long term constitute a weakness in the face of an Apple VR which will carry a dedicated OS (RealityOS?) undoubtedly ultra-optimized down to the smallest bricks of the system.