Meta reportedly breaks up the 300-person team that was building a hybrid VR / AR OS

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

According to a report by The Information, Meta has broken up the team tasked with working on an OS for virtual reality headsets and moved some of the engineers to work on augmented reality headsets. Meta denied recently that it had halted work on the team's project creating a unified custom operating system for its headsets.

The team was working on an augmented and virtual reality project, but it was canceled in January. Reality Labs included a link to the Metagrowing careers page after the reports came out, according to Vice President Gabriel Aul. Aul said that the company is still working on a highly specialized OS for their devices.

Meta is hoping to speed up the development of solutions that are hyper-tuned for each product line bybedding more OS engineers directly into its augmented and virtual reality teams. This suggests that Meta's current approach is to prioritize each team's OS customizations for its own projects, instead of a centralized team and new software platform.

Engineers from the XROS team are assigned to work on projects involving eye- and hand- tracking through computer vision, according to The Information. It isn't clear where every employee from the XROS team will end up, according to the report.

As Meta works on changing its image overall, the obvious example is its recent name change to signify a focus on, the metaverse, and plans for a virtual world that heavily involves virtual and augmented reality products. The company recently updated its values, telling employees to move fast together and focus on long term impact.

The operating system for the headsets is based on Android. It isn't clear what future headsets will use, but given what seems to be happening to the XROS team, it seems unlikely.

Sheeva Slovan is a Meta spokesman.

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.