(Commonwealth Union)_ Meta laid off 13% of its workers last week. This translates to 11,000 employees. These are the company’s first mass layoffs in its 18-year history.
In recent staff meetings, Meta’s executives revealed additional cost-cutting measures. As a result, the company will discontinue its Portal-branded video chat gadget business and terminate two smartwatch initiatives, according to Reuters. The Verge later corroborated this, citing company sources.
In June, it was reported that Meta had internally changed the target audience of Portal devices from consumers to enterprises. According to reports, Meta also cancelled the Milan smartwatch project. The odd wearable was expected to be available in spring 2023.
During the epidemic, demand for smartwatches soared, but total sales fell short of forecasts. According to Engadget, Meta’s chief technical officer Andrew Bosworth stated of the product’s fate on Friday. “It would just take so long and demand so much expenditure to break into the enterprise segment that it felt like the wrong way to invest time and money.”
Meta’s EMG wristband is ostensibly the next innovative input device, employing electromyography to transform nerve signals at the wrist into computer commands. AR controls progress from controllers to exaggerated hand motions to micro gestures in this manner. At Meta Connect 2022, Mark Zuckerberg exhibited this application scenario.
The EMG technology was originally expected to appear in later versions of Meta’s smartwatch. The bracelet is now being developed independently and is scheduled to emerge alongside Meta’s AR headgear Project Nazare, whose commercialization has been delayed until 2026 due to technical issues.
Despite the closure of the Milan smartwatch initiative, Bosworth stated at the time that the development of EMG wrist wearables and AR headsets would continue. Bosworth also stated that the smartwatch team will now focus on Meta’s AR headset, and that half of Reality Labs’ investment will go into augmented reality initiatives. UploadVR announced in October that the VR and AR division would focus on four tech platforms in the future: VR headsets, Horizon and avatars, AR headsets, and neural interfaces such as the EMG bracelet, which would be introduced in 2021.
