Reality Labs Faces Cutbacks; A New Peek at Cambria

There’s good news and bad news swirling around Meta Platforms today. We’ve learned a bit more about its upcoming Project Cambria headset and Meta’s plans to make it easier to create mixed reality apps for it and Quest. But there’s a shadow looming over those announcements: on Wednesday evening, Reuters reported that Meta is planning cutbacks at Reality Labs that will lead to delays and cancellations within the division.

Let’s focus on the situation inside Reality Labs first. A Meta spokesperson confirmed that CTO Andrew Bosworth announced the cutbacks to staff on Tuesday. Meta isn’t planning layoffs, but Bosworth has yet to specify which projects will be affected. It’s hard to guess at what might be getting axed or put on ice. And with Meta recently scaling back its expense outlook for the year only by a few billion dollars, the company will likely still end up spending as much or more on Reality Labs this year as it did in 2021.