Meta Makes Major Changes to Speed Reality Labs’ Progress

Meta is reportedly reconfiguring its Reality Labs hardware division to “adapt and execute faster.”

Maher Saba, head of the tech giant’s new Applied AI Engineering division, outlined the overhaul in a memo Tuesday (April 14), The Information reported.

Saba, who had been vice president of Reality Labs Foundation before moving to his new role, acknowledged the changes were “big” but argued they were necessary.

“This industry moves fast,” he wrote. “If we don’t adapt, we get left behind.”

The reorganization will see some members of the foundations team move to the Reality Labs wearables group. The quality assurance and “dogfooding” team, as well the trust and platform foundations team, will be embedded directly within the wearables and virtual reality units.

(The report notes that “dogfooding” is a term for testing products and services in-house before a public launch.)

According to the memo, the foundations group will be spread across product teams to allow closer collaboration with the groups they support.

Meta made large cuts to Reality Labs earlier this year, laying off more than 1,500 workers in January and making additional cuts last month.

“Just a few years ago, the metaverse looked like the next platform shift, promising immersive digital worlds where people would live, work and transact at scale,” PYMNTS wrote late last year in a report looking at the company’s Reality Lab struggles.

“Today, Meta’s virtual universe is not dead, but it certainly has shrunk and left is a sobering record of investment, stalled consumer adoption and a set of hard lessons about how innovation in payments and commerce really happens.”

In other Meta hardware news, the company said recently it plans to share what it learns at its Meta Lab stores with the retailers of its AI and virtual reality (VR)-enabled wearables. The tech giant has five Meta Lab stores and uses them to allow shoppers to experience the company’s AI smart glasses and VR headsets.

“We can see what’s drawing people in, and if the layout is confusing, we’ll fix it,” Nicola Mendelsohn, head of global business group at Meta, said last week at Shoptalk, per a Retail Touchpoints report. “We want to bring people together not just to browse but to participate.”

Meta announced in January that it was postponing the global launch of its smartglasses due to “unprecedented demand and inventory” that caused waitlists to extend well into 2026.

“We’ll continue to focus on fulfilling orders in the U.S. while we re-evaluate our approach to international availability,” the company said at the time.