According to Reuters: Meta plans to lay off employees in the chip development team (FAST) of Reality Labs, a metaverse-related department.
Meta employees were notified about the layoffs on the internal forum Workplace, according to two people familiar with the matter. It is said that Meta will publish the company’s notification of their final status early Wednesday morning local time. A Meta spokesman declined to comment.
According to public records, Meta’s FAST division has approximately 600 employees. The division has previously been working on developing custom chips to provide Meta devices with unique features and improved performance that differentiate them from other VR/AR devices.
However, Meta has been unable to produce a chip that can compete with outside products, so its devices are equipped with Qualcomm chips.
The Quest 3 released by Meta last week is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chip and 8GB of built-in memory. Meta said its graphics performance is twice that of the Quest 2 and even better than the Quest Pro running the previous generation XR2+ chip.
The 128GB Quest 3 is priced at US$499.99 (currently about RMB 3655), and the 512GB version is priced at US$649.99 (currently about RMB 4751).
The company is also developing AR glasses that are more technically challenging, smaller and look more like regular glasses, as well as related smartwatches, people familiar with the matter said.
The first version of the product will be ready next year, the person said, although Meta does not initially plan to make it widely available to consumers.
