In their latest Instagram Q&A session, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and VP AR/VR Andrew Bosworth talked about the new "reality operating system".
In 2019, it was reported that Facebook was creating a new OS for AR glasses, and in the latest Instagram live session, it was confirmed that the team was working on a brand new operating system. However, it might be way more ambitious than anyone ever thought.
“If you’re building a pair of glasses that need to look like normal glasses, you need to have the system be so tightly optimized so you can basically do all the computation that you would expect from a modern computer, but do it on someone’s face within a thermal envelope and a power envelope that can last all day long," said Mark Zuckerberg.
He also added that "the team is pretty far along in this, at this point." Facebook Reality Labs are working on a microkernel-based operating system. Initially, Facebook's AR team did not intend to build a lot from scratch but the scale of the project required a tremendous amount of work.
“When software is available for us to use, we love using it. Obviously, our Oculus and Portal systems are built on Android, which we’ve had great success with. I want to build as little as I can. What is amazing is how much you have to build to fit into these tight thermal envelopes," added Andrew Bosworth.
We can only guess how big the new project is considering that Facebook has about 10,000 employees in the AR/VR division (according to a report published by The Information on March 11, 2021). This is almost a fifth of all Facebook employees worldwide. Mark Lucovsky is currently leading the AR software platform also known as 'The Reality Platform'. At the moment there are 626 open positions in Facebook's AR/VR department.
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