Published in Mobiles

Facebook abandons its secretive research lab

by on17 December 2018


Building 8 closed and its work is distributed

Facebook has disbanded its secretive research lab, where the company developed new hardware like its Portal speakers and researched moonshot projects like brain computer interfaces.

Building 8, which was created in 2016 to house some of its most ambitious projects, has been disbanded and the projects have been redistributed to other groups within the social media company,.

The change, which was first reported by Business Insider, marks the end of the "Building 8" brand. Facebook has separated the Portal team into its own group, which oversees Facebook's other "unannounced hardware projects." Meanwhile, Building 8's researchers have been shuffled to Facebook Reality Labs (FRL), another new group at Facebook lead by Facebook's top VR researcher, Michael Abrash.

The FRL group was created in May, around the same time Facebook announced a bigger reorganisation among its top executives.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to BI that the Building 8 brand was no more, but said it continues to work on the same projects and hasn't laid off any employees as a result of the restructuring.

"Building 8 was the early name of the team building consumer hardware at Facebook. Building 8 is part of Facebook's AR/VR organization. Now that we're shipping, it's the Portal team. And Rafa Camargo is still leading the team; that has not changed. We also unified research looking at longer terms projects under one team, which became Facebook Reality Labs, which is also part of our AR/VR organization. This includes research projects like the Brain Computer Interface", the spokesperson said.

 

Last modified on 17 December 2018
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