A fifth of Facebook employees are now working on VR and AR
Facebook has nearly 10,000 employees in its group developing AR and VR devices out of 58,604 employees, according to a report from The Information based on internal regulatory data.
This number means that the Facebook Reality Labs division represents nearly one-fifth of Facebook's total global workforce worldwide, and this number also indicates that Facebook is significantly accelerating its VR and AR efforts.
And as UploadVR noted, in 2017 the Oculus VR division acquired more than a thousand employees at a time when Facebook had a total of 18,770 employees overall, indicating that the proportion was around 5 percent.
Since then, Facebook has focused more on VR, including beyond its Oculus Rift-style pair of headphones, by launching the Oculus Quest and Quest 2, which are two standalone wireless devices that do not require a PC.
Initial order for Quest 2 - $ 300 - was more than five times greater than those for its predecessor, as developers saw an increase in sales of existing games.
“Most of what we do today is build on top of other people's platforms,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview this week about Facebook's virtual and augmented reality ambitions.
He added: I think it makes sense that we invest deeply to help shape what I think will be the next major computing platform, which blends augmented and virtual reality, in order to make sure that it evolves in the way that is fundamentally about people being with each other and meeting together.
In recent years, Facebook has put in place a strict strategy to build its consumer devices to reduce its dependence on Apple and Google, the two dominant mobile operating systems.
Nearly 97 percent of Facebook's revenue comes from advertising, and the release of Oculus Quest 2 at the end of 2020 helped generate a massive increase in non-ad revenue for the company, with up to $ 885 million in the last three months of 2020 compared to 346 million. Dollars during the same period in 2019.
The continued investment is expected to extend at least until the 1930s as Facebook looks to reduce its dependence on app distribution.