Facebook Guardians Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth reportedly announced the biggest restructuring of the company’s hardware division since it was renamed Reality Labs in the year 2020. According to an exclusive report by ‘The Verge’, all the teams of Reality Labs will be consolidated into two groups: a central ‘The Metaverse‘ organization and a new ‘wearables’ organization.
This reorganization aims to create a more seamless experience for users by bringing hardware, software, and metaverse development under closer collaboration. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth Explains, “This new structure allows us to create a more integrated product experience across hardware, software, and experiences, reducing friction and fragmentation.” The reorganization also includes some layoffs within Reality Labs. These primarily target management positions that became redundant due to the new, streamlined organizational structure.
By restructuring Reality Labs, Meta aims to create a unified product experience across hardware, software, and experiences. Mixed reality hardware and software will now be developed in a single department: “This new structure will enable us to create a more integrated product experience with less friction and fragmentation across hardware, software, and experiences,” says Bosworth.
Metaverse Division: This division will focus on creating a coherent metaverse experience. It will include the popular Quest VR headset line, the Horizon Operating System (Horizon OS), and the social VR platform Horizon Worlds. Vishal Shahwho previously led Horizon, will now oversee both the Horizon and Quest product lines under the metaverse.
Wearables Division: This division will focus on Meta’s future in augmented reality (AR). It will include AR projects such as smartglasses and AR headsets, with an emphasis on integrating technology from Meta AI. This division will be led by veteran Meta VP Alex Himmel.
Here’s the company-wide memo that Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth sent to employees
Updation in the structure of R.L.
With Quest 3 bringing MR into the mainstream, we’ve finally reached a place where we feel all the key components are in place to continue evolving our software platform. The best reflection of this is that we now have a long-term view of how the software experience is going to evolve over the next two years.
Meanwhile, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses have been even more successful than we expected, which bodes well for our near-term AR roadmap. Combining this with the exciting functionality of Meta AI, we see a lot of value from the products we’re building, even before the full AR vision is ready.
As Mark and I discussed in IRL, we’re seeing the different paths we’ve taken narrow and become more clear. Here are the changes we’re making to recognize and take advantage of that shift.
The Metaverse
We are bringing the team working on MR into the Metaverse product group led by Vishal Shah and realigning the components to be more horizontally aligned rather than vertically. We are deeply committed to investing in Horizon as the core foundation of our social, spatial Horizon OS, and delivering high-quality experiences for both mixed reality and mobile. This new structure will enable us to build more integrated product experiences across hardware, software, and experiences with less friction and fragmentation.
This will also help us deliver an integrated platform with the right components and toolchain so that we can be the preferred choice for creators and developers building on the next generation of computing devices. I cannot stress enough how important it is for us to get these platform pieces right and progressing within our existing framework has been a challenge. I am excited to see this all take shape.
Wearable
We are renaming the AR product group led by Alex Himmel to Wearables. We have the leading AI device on the market right now, and we are doubling down on finding strong product market fit for wearable meta AI, building a business around it, and expanding the audience. Our goal of seamlessly overlaying digital content onto the physical world remains the same, but the steps on that path have gotten even more exciting.
The immense opportunities that the acceleration of AI has brought to the team necessitated a horizontal reorganization late last year to enable them to move quickly against these headwinds and continue to integrate product areas into a coherent roadmap across wearable form factors, platforms, and AI.
XR Techniques, Tools & RLBG
As part of this transformation, we are also moving parts of XR technology that are closely tied to the product or platform into wearables and the metaverse.
In turn, we will rethink the interface between devices and XR tech. XR tech will continue to be our primary team, focused on developing technology that is too early or risky for product teams to adopt, especially if it benefits both the metaverse and wearables. We will share more details about this when we have more in a couple of weeks.
The RLBG, led by Dan Reed, will unify content design across product groups. Other groups like PMM, UXR, analytics, and sales will remain centralized as they are today. However we are creating two new roles we call “business group leads,” one for metaverse and one for wearables, to partner with their respective product group leads and help them coordinate across the breadth of the RLBG.
the road ahead
The org chart doesn’t primarily determine whether we will succeed or fail, but rather our implementation, but by setting it up this way I hope we will reduce overhead and allow people across teams to come together and implement with a more unified view of who our customers are and how we can best serve them.
If you’re not already a Command Line subscriber, don’t forget to sign up and get future issues delivered straight to your inbox. You’ll also get full access to an archive featuring information about companies like Meta, Google, OpenAI, and more.
(Note: This memo first appeared in The Verge)
This reorganization aims to create a more seamless experience for users by bringing hardware, software, and metaverse development under closer collaboration. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth Explains, “This new structure allows us to create a more integrated product experience across hardware, software, and experiences, reducing friction and fragmentation.” The reorganization also includes some layoffs within Reality Labs. These primarily target management positions that became redundant due to the new, streamlined organizational structure.
By restructuring Reality Labs, Meta aims to create a unified product experience across hardware, software, and experiences. Mixed reality hardware and software will now be developed in a single department: “This new structure will enable us to create a more integrated product experience with less friction and fragmentation across hardware, software, and experiences,” says Bosworth.
Metaverse Division: This division will focus on creating a coherent metaverse experience. It will include the popular Quest VR headset line, the Horizon Operating System (Horizon OS), and the social VR platform Horizon Worlds. Vishal Shahwho previously led Horizon, will now oversee both the Horizon and Quest product lines under the metaverse.
Wearables Division: This division will focus on Meta’s future in augmented reality (AR). It will include AR projects such as smartglasses and AR headsets, with an emphasis on integrating technology from Meta AI. This division will be led by veteran Meta VP Alex Himmel.
Here’s the company-wide memo that Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth sent to employees
Updation in the structure of R.L.
With Quest 3 bringing MR into the mainstream, we’ve finally reached a place where we feel all the key components are in place to continue evolving our software platform. The best reflection of this is that we now have a long-term view of how the software experience is going to evolve over the next two years.
Meanwhile, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses have been even more successful than we expected, which bodes well for our near-term AR roadmap. Combining this with the exciting functionality of Meta AI, we see a lot of value from the products we’re building, even before the full AR vision is ready.
As Mark and I discussed in IRL, we’re seeing the different paths we’ve taken narrow and become more clear. Here are the changes we’re making to recognize and take advantage of that shift.
The Metaverse
We are bringing the team working on MR into the Metaverse product group led by Vishal Shah and realigning the components to be more horizontally aligned rather than vertically. We are deeply committed to investing in Horizon as the core foundation of our social, spatial Horizon OS, and delivering high-quality experiences for both mixed reality and mobile. This new structure will enable us to build more integrated product experiences across hardware, software, and experiences with less friction and fragmentation.
This will also help us deliver an integrated platform with the right components and toolchain so that we can be the preferred choice for creators and developers building on the next generation of computing devices. I cannot stress enough how important it is for us to get these platform pieces right and progressing within our existing framework has been a challenge. I am excited to see this all take shape.
Wearable
We are renaming the AR product group led by Alex Himmel to Wearables. We have the leading AI device on the market right now, and we are doubling down on finding strong product market fit for wearable meta AI, building a business around it, and expanding the audience. Our goal of seamlessly overlaying digital content onto the physical world remains the same, but the steps on that path have gotten even more exciting.
The immense opportunities that the acceleration of AI has brought to the team necessitated a horizontal reorganization late last year to enable them to move quickly against these headwinds and continue to integrate product areas into a coherent roadmap across wearable form factors, platforms, and AI.
XR Techniques, Tools & RLBG
As part of this transformation, we are also moving parts of XR technology that are closely tied to the product or platform into wearables and the metaverse.
In turn, we will rethink the interface between devices and XR tech. XR tech will continue to be our primary team, focused on developing technology that is too early or risky for product teams to adopt, especially if it benefits both the metaverse and wearables. We will share more details about this when we have more in a couple of weeks.
The RLBG, led by Dan Reed, will unify content design across product groups. Other groups like PMM, UXR, analytics, and sales will remain centralized as they are today. However we are creating two new roles we call “business group leads,” one for metaverse and one for wearables, to partner with their respective product group leads and help them coordinate across the breadth of the RLBG.
the road ahead
The org chart doesn’t primarily determine whether we will succeed or fail, but rather our implementation, but by setting it up this way I hope we will reduce overhead and allow people across teams to come together and implement with a more unified view of who our customers are and how we can best serve them.
If you’re not already a Command Line subscriber, don’t forget to sign up and get future issues delivered straight to your inbox. You’ll also get full access to an archive featuring information about companies like Meta, Google, OpenAI, and more.
(Note: This memo first appeared in The Verge)
