Facebook has nearly 10,000 employees in its division working on augmented and virtual reality devices, according to a report in The information based on internal organizational data. The number means that the Reality Labs division accounts for almost a fifth of the people who work on Facebook worldwide.
This suggests that Facebook has significantly accelerated its VR and AR efforts. How UploadVR observed in 2017, the Oculus VR division represented more than 1,000 employees at a time when the total number of Facebook employees was 18,770, indicating a percentage somewhere north of five percent.
Since then, Facebook has shifted its focus from virtual reality away from Oculus Rift-style headsets with the launch of Oculus Quest and Quest 2, which are stand-alone wireless devices that don’t require a PC. The $ 299 Quest 2 was pre-ordered five times more than its predecessor, with developers seeing an increase in sales of their existing titles.
“Today, a lot of what Facebook does is … we are building on other people’s platforms,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg The information in an interview this week about Facebook’s VR and AR ambitions. “I think it really makes sense to invest deeply to help shape what I think will be the next big computing platform, this combination of augmented and virtual reality, to ensure that it develops in that way that is fundamentally about people being present one with each other and be together. “