By changing Facebook's name to Meta, Mark Zuckerberg wanted to demonstrate the company's shift in focus: it would no longer concentrate solely on social networks, but would instead focus on creating virtual reality applications and solutions , as well as the metaverse . Just a few months after the name change, it has been leaked that they have canceled an ambitious project for a virtual and augmented reality operating system, on which 300 people worked.
Meta would have suspended the development of a custom operating system that was to be used for the next virtual reality and augmented reality headsets. The Information has released this news today, which states that the cancellation was made in the month of November,
A possible big cancellation of the Meta system
It's true that Meta uses the Android-based operating system found in Quest VR devices, which is convenient for them to use, but it makes them dependent on a third-party operating system like Android. The Information reports that development of the XROS operating system began in 2017 and involved more than 300 people.
There's no reason to fear that the cancellation of XROS will affect Meta's plans to produce new augmented reality glasses in the short or long term. At most, it would indicate that they will continue using an Android-based system for now. The development of XROS may have been halted shortly after Mark Lucovsky announced he was leaving to work on a similar project at Google. Lucovsky's resignation came after former Facebook employee Frances Haugen publicly accused the company of harmful business practices in a 60 Minutes interview.
Everything indicates that Meta remains interested in creating its own operating system, which could include a revamped version of XROS. Meta's foray into metaverses and augmented reality is a very large project with high expectations of becoming one of the great promises of the future of the internet, much like Web3.
Source: The Verge