Facebook changed the company's name to Meta more than two years ago because it believed that metaspace would be an important technology in the future. This did not happen and now the focus is on the development of artificial intelligence (AI) by Mark Zuckerberg. This morning Fortune published a report that Meta's change in direction also caused the development of their own augmented reality (AR) chip to be canceled.
A self-designed AR chip is required for Orion's smart glasses that not only come with AR capabilities but also AI processing. But in order to reduce costs, chip development has been canceled and Meta will only use chips manufactured by Qualcomm from now on.
The cost of independent chip development is high and metamesta is no longer the main focus, causing this program to be sacrificed. Meta Reality Labs has lost over $4.6 billion since Facebook changed its name to Meta with no results in Meta Quest sales and Horizon Worlds user volume.
In the early stages no AR-specific chips seem to be compatible with what the Meta needs. But Qualcomm, which is quite aggressive in the world of VR, AR, and XR, has launched several chips specifically for these needs. Qualcomm already has agreements with Google and Samsung for MR headsets that will compete with the Apple Vision Pro.