Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Meta reportedly pulled the plug on a custom operating system that was supposed to power upcoming virtual and augmented reality headsets, although its full reasoning and future plans still aren’t clear. The Information reported the news today, saying the company formerly named Facebook suspended development of a project called XROS — named after XR, an umbrella term for AR / VR — in November. That leaves Meta with the Android-based operating system used in Quest (previously Oculus) VR devices, something that offers convenience but also makes Meta dependent on another company’s OS.
The Information article reports that XROS development began in 2017 and had more than 300 people working on it. It’s apparently synonymous with the “reality…
