Mark Zuckerberg’s “Year of Efficiency” at Meta—a cost-cutting drive that began in February 2023 with the likely goal of diverting resources to AI's costly needs—keeps getting extended. And it seems to be having a major effect on the company’s augmented reality efforts.
Meta is widely expected to show off a prototype of its first AR glasses, codenamed Orion, next month. (Meta already makes “smart glasses” with EssilorLuxottica that don’t overlay any digital information on the lens, and it makes relatively bulky Quest headsets that offer “mixed reality” AR/VR features on their screens. Orion would presumably fit somewhere in-between these offerings.)
But Fortune’s Kali Hays reported yesterday that the device won’t be powered by custom chips, as was originally planned. This in-house development effort was killed off last year, meaning Orion and its successors will run on Qualcomm silicon. It remains to be seen how much of an effect forgoing custom chips will have on performance and power efficiency.
As Kali reported: “Amid mass layoffs and cost-cutting efforts throughout the company, work on custom chips was deemed too expensive, and the need for the chips too far removed from current business priorities.”
But that’s not all. Yesterday, Meta announced it will kill off the “Spark” toolset that third-party developers have for years used to easily create AR effects for Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger—and even for exhibitions and art installations, via a desktop application.
Meta’s own Spark AR effects for its stable of apps will survive, but, less than five months from now, bang goes all the work that brands and individual creators have done on the platform over the last eight years.
Now’s a good time to revisit the heartwarming videos about the Spark ecosystem that Meta once published, such as this one about how a creator found purpose in making scary clown-face overlays for U2 singer Bono. People built businesses around making and even selling Spark AR effects, but all those filters and 3D objects will be deleted along with the Spark platform. (Videos that already feature the effects won't be impacted.)
“This decision is part of our larger efforts to prioritize the products we believe will best serve the future needs of our consumers and business customers alike,” Meta said in a statement that set Jan. 14 next year as the termination date for third-party Spark effects. A separate Q&A says Meta will “prioritize investments in other company priorities,” which is about as vague as you can get.
Spark effect creators, unsurprisingly, are pretty furious.
“It’s a huge disrespect to us and also to the Facebook/Instagram users,” TechCrunch quotes one creator, Douglas Costa, as saying. “Five months to end development? It should be at least a year so that we creators can have a better opportunity to build a new portfolio or find a new job.”
So it will be interesting to see not only the hardware that Meta reveals next month, but also whether the company is still interested in having any kind of third-party developer ecosystem around its AR platform. If so, it will have some convincing to do. But maybe effect development will just turn out to be another job for AI.
More news below.
David Meyer
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