How Meta decides what hardware to make

A peek into the development process at Reality Labs: “If there’s a part of your body that could potentially host a wearable that could do AI, there’s a good chance we’ve had a team run that down.”

By Alex Heath, a deputy editor and author of the Command Line newsletter. He has over a decade of experience covering the tech industry.

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When I recently met with Meta’s top executives, I wanted to know about more than the company’s first AR glasses, Orion.

In the weeks leading up to our meeting, reports had surfaced about new devices the company’s hardware division, Reality Labs, was working on, from camera earbuds to mixed reality goggles. I had also been hearing rumors of tinkering on new variations of AI-enabled wearables. During my interview with Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth just before this year’s Connect conference, we discussed not only some of these possible future products but also how Meta approaches hardware development in general, which I haven’t seen the company explain publicly before.

“If there’s a concept that you could imagine, we either have had or do have somebody building a thing around it,” Bosworth told me. He described a multiphase development process for how Reality Labs takes products from inception to shipping. First, there’s a “pre-discovery team” that is “prototyping the craziest stuff.” They put a “proof of experience” together, and then, after executive review, a “small number” of these concepts graduate to what Meta calls its “discovery” phase, where a product is assigned “a few” dedicated employees to examine what the industrial design would be, along with other factors like cost.

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A peek into the development process at Reality Labs: “If there’s a part of your body that could potentially host a wearable that could do AI, there’s a good chance we’ve had a team run that down.”

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