The image is by Alex Castro.
Meta pulled the plug on a custom operating system that was supposed to power upcoming virtual and augmented reality headsets, although its full reasoning and future plans still aren't clear. The Information reported today that the company formerly known as Facebook suspended development of a project called XROS in November. Meta is dependent on another company's OS, something that offers convenience, but also makes it hard for Meta to use another company's OS.
More than 300 people worked on the XROS development, according to the Information article. It is synonymous with the "reality operating system" that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and CTO Andrew Bosworth have discussed publicly before. In June of 2021, he said that a team was pretty far along on the initiative and that it would be a not too distant future. There is no sign that canceling XROS will affect Meta's plans to produce new augmented reality glasses, which include prototypes known as Project Aria and Nazare, but it may mean that they use anANDROID-based OS.
Mark Lucovsky, the team lead for XROS, left to work on a similar project at Google. Lucovsky told The Information that he left because of the company's new focus on virtual reality and augmented reality, as well as because of a 60 Minutes interview with a former employee who accused the company of harmful business practices. The company did not respond to the request for comment.
The dominance of Apple and Google in mobile phones has led to the emergence of virtual reality and augmented reality. The company is interested in building its own OS, possibly including a revived version of XROS.
