Meta's CTO explains the development stages VR products go through
Meta's CTO recently provided an insight into the development phases of VR headsets within Meta, from the initial concept to the finished product.
In a conversation with Verge reporter Alex Heath, Andrew Bosworth explained how concepts become products. They go through four stages before Meta decides to bring them to market.
- Pre-discovery:In this phase, a team experiments with the "craziest stuff" and builds it to the point where people can try the concepts and get a sense of the experience.
- Discovery: After an executive review, a "small number" of these concepts move to the second phase, where they are assigned to "a few" dedicated employees who examine the industrial design and other factors such as cost.
- Prototyping: If the concept also passes the second phase, it moves on to prototyping, where there are “maybe 10 times more people involved” to build hardware and software that works together.
- Engineering Validation Test (EVT): About half of these prototypes make it to the final stage, where management decides whether the prototype will become a product. According to Bosworth, this happens with about half of the EVT prototypes. At this point, Meta deploys a full team with the presumptive plan to ship a product.
Meta confirms work on ultra-lightweight mixed reality glasses
Bosworth also confirmed that Meta has stopped work on a device codenamed La Jolla. This was a potential Meta Quest Pro 2 that was supposed to be released in 2027.
Bosworth also confirmed that Meta is working on lightweight mixed reality goggles codenamed Puffin. This prototype recently moved from the pre-discovery phase to the discovery phase. This means that the MR glasses still have two phases to go through before they get the green light to become a product.
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