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| A fifth of Facebook employees are now working on VR and AR |
According to the information report, which is based on internal government data, Facebook has nearly 10,000 employees on its team responsible for developing AR and VR devices for a total of 58,604 employees.
This number means that Facebook Reality Labs division makes up nearly a fifth of Facebook's global workforce. This number also shows that Facebook is greatly accelerating VR and AR workflow.
As UploadVR noted, the Oculus VR division employed more than 1,000 people in 2017. At that point, Facebook had 18,770 employees, or about 5%.
Facebook has since released Oculus Quest and Quest 2, which are two standalone wireless devices that do not require a PC. Not only does it focus on virtual reality, but it also pays more attention to virtual reality, including Oculus Rift headphones.
Quest 2's initial asking price is $ 300, more than five times the previous product, as developers have found that sales of existing games have increased.
“A lot of our work today depends on other people's platforms,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview this week.
He added, I think it makes sense that we make deep investments to build what I believe is the next major computing platform that combines augmented reality and virtual reality to make sure it's essential for people. In order to meet.
In recent years, Facebook has pursued a strict strategy to build its consumer devices to reduce dependence on the two major mobile operating systems, Apple and Google.
Nearly 97% of Facebook's revenue comes from advertising, and Oculus Quest 2, released in late 2020, has helped significantly increase the company's non-ad revenue, which could reach $ 885 million to $ 346 million over the three years. Past. Month 2020. For the same period in 2019, in US dollars.
While Facebook hopes to reduce its dependence on app distribution, the continued investment is expected to continue until at least the 1930s.