Meta has acquired the Belgian-Dutch company Luxexcel, a 3D printing firm creating complex glass lenses for use in AR optics.
As first reported by Belgian newspaper De Tijd(Dutch), the Turnhout, Belgium-based company was quietly acquired by Facebook parent Meta in an ostensible bid to bolster the development of its in-development AR glasses.
Details of the acquisition are still under wraps, however confirmation by Meta was obtained by English language publication The Brussels Times.
“We are delighted that the Luxexcel team has joined Meta. This extends the partnership between the two companies,” Meta says.
Founded in 2009, Luxexcel first focused on 3D printing lenses for automotive, industrial optics, and the aerospace industry. Over the years Luxexcel shifted to using its 3D printing tech to create prescription lenses for the eyewear market.
In 2020, the company made its first entry into the smart eyewear market by combining 3D printed prescription lenses with the integration of technology. One year later, Luxexcel partnered with UK-based waveguide company WaveOptics, which has since been acquired by Snapchat parent Snap.
Meta’s interest in Luxexcel undoubtedly stems from its ability to print complex optics for both smart glasses and AR headsets; Meta’s Project Aria is rumored to house Luxexcel-built lenses. Project Aria is a sensor-rich pair of glasses which the company created to train its AR perception systems, as well as asses public perception of the technology.
John Carmack, legendary programmer and key player in the Oculus gensis story, announced he’s left Meta, writing in a memo to employees that he “wearied of the fight” of trying to push for change at the highest levels of the company.
Carmack has never been one to mince words. Outside of bringing industry expertise to Oculus in 2013—notably a year before Meta (ex-Facebook) acquired the VR headset startup for $2 billion—Carmack has been a rare window into the world of consumer VR and one of the most important companies behind it. And even now, it appears we’re getting a peek into how things work in Meta, or rather, how they don’t work.
Last Friday, Carmack sent out a memo to employees saying he was effectively leaving Meta, mentioning the company’s VR efforts were developing at “half the effectiveness that would make me happy.”
Carmack demos an early Oculus Rift prototype at E3 2012
Parts of the memo were previously leaked in a Business Insider piece, however Carmack went one step further by releasing the memo in a Facebook update. We’ve included the text in full at the bottom of the article.
Having spearheaded Oculus’ mobile efforts throughout his tenure, in 2019 Carmack stepped down as Oculus CTO to a “consulting CTO” position, something he said would reduce his time spent at the company to a “modest slice” so he could pursue new ventures outside of VR.
Still, Carmack says the last few years at Meta has been a struggle:
“I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I’m evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.”
He contends the waning sway within Meta was “admittedly self-inflicted,” owing to the fact that he wasn’t really up to engaging with C-level battles for influence:
“I could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to wage battles with generations of leadership, but I was busy programming, and I assumed I would hate it, be bad at it, and probably lose anyway.”
Carmack says in a follow-up Twitter thread that there was “a notable gap between Mark Zuckerberg and I on various strategic issues, so I knew it would be extra frustrating to keep pushing my viewpoint internally.”
Before making the move to Meta vis-à-vis Oculus, John Carmack was co-founder and Technical Director of the famous id Software. He also founded Armadillo Aerospace, a private aerospace company. Carmack says he is now “all in” working on artificial general intelligence (AGI) at his startup Keen Technologies.
The full text of his internal memo follows below:
This is the end of my decade in VR.
I have mixed feelings.
Quest 2 is almost exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning – mobile hardware, inside out tracking, optional PC streaming, 4k (ish) screen, cost effective. Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people are still getting value out of it. We have a good product. It is successful, and successful products make the world a better place. It all could have happened a bit faster and been going better if different decisions had been made, but we built something pretty close to The Right Thing.
The issue is our efficiency.
Some will ask why I care how the progress is happening, as long as it is happening?
If I am trying to sway others, I would say that an org that has only known inefficiency is ill prepared for the inevitable competition and/or belt tightening, but really, it is the more personal pain of seeing a 5% GPU utilization number in production. I am offended by it.
[edit: I was being overly poetic here, as several people have missed the intention. As a systems optimization person, I care deeply about efficiency. When you work hard at optimization for most of your life, seeing something that is grossly inefficient hurts your soul. I was likening observing our organization’s performance to seeing a tragically low number on a profiling tool.]
We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy. Some may scoff and contend we are doing just fine, but others will laugh and say “Half? Ha! I’m at quarter efficiency!”
It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I’m evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.
This was admittedly self-inflicted – I could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to wage battles with generations of leadership, but I was busy programming, and I assumed I would hate it, be bad at it, and probably lose anyway.
Enough complaining. I wearied of the fight and have my own startup to run, but the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do it than Meta. Maybe it actually is possible to get there by just plowing ahead with current practices, but there is plenty of room for improvement.
Make better decisions and fill your products with “Give a Damn”
In an effort to harden the security of its hardware products, Meta today announced new guidelines for its Bug Bounty program, specifying the inclusion of both the Quest Pro headset and Touch Pro controllers, and what the company will pay out for specific bugs uncovered by security researchers.
Like some other tech companies, Meta runs a Bug Bounty program which encourages hackers security researchers to probe its products for vulnerabilities in exchange for a payout.
Meta has been running this program for some time across various products, but today the company added new payout guidelines specific to its VR products, including Quest Pro and the Touch Pro controllers, as well as Quest 2, Quest 1, and many of the company’s recent non-VR hardware products.
According to the guidelines, Meta is offering up to $45,000 for major exploits on its hardware products (like remote code execution on a headset), and between $500–$3,000 for smaller exploits (like sneaking an app around the user’s permission settings).
The guidelines detail how Meta will assess the various classes of exploits and how their severity will determine the payout. The company says it will take a range of factors into consideration, including findings that could “potentially result in physical health and safety and privacy risks.”
Photo by Road to VR
One of the most interesting additions of included devices in the program is surely the Touch Pro controllers. As far as Meta’s VR headsets go, this is a whole new class of device—essentially a little computer capable of tracking its own position thanks to three on-board cameras. None of the company’s prior VR headsets have had such sophisticated controllers, and it will be interesting to see if they open the door to any new security vulnerabilities.
In a blog post recounting the last year of the company’s Bug Bounty program, Meta says it paid out some $2 million to security researchers this year. The company says it got around 10,000 reports in 2022, 750 (7.5%) of which it determined qualified for a payout. That makes the average bounty payment for 2022 around $2,700 per qualifying bug.
If you were waiting for Beat Saber to finally get the classic and alternative rock DLC it’s deserved since it first launched with an EDM-heavy music catalogue in 2018, the wait is over with the block-slashing rhythm game’s first Rock Mixtape.
The Rock Mixtape is now available across all supported headsets, which includes Quest 2, SteamVR headsets, and PSVR, priced at $11 for the full eight-song music pack.
The tracklist hits some of the most influential classic and alternative rock music, including:
Steppenwolf — Born To Be Wild
Survivor — Eye of the Tiger
KISS — I Was Made For Lovin’ You
LynyrdSkynyrd — Free Bird
The White Stripes — Seven Nation Army
Nirvana — Smells Like Teen Spirit
Guns N’ Roses — Sweet Child O’ Mine
Foo Fighters — The Pretender
Meta-owned developer Beat Games also included custom environments for several of the trackins, including lighting effects and color schemes in Seven Nation Army inspired by its iconic 2003 music video.
Eye of the Tiger’s environment was designed in the style of a FitBeat-style obstacle level, which ought to get your heartrate up. Speaking of heartrates, Free Bird is now the game’s longest song at nine minutes, throwing over 3,000 notes at you for some heavy slicing action.
Meta hasn’t rolled out colocation services for the entire Quest platform yet—meaning a pair of Quest 2 headsets can’t automatically ‘see’ each other in the same physical playspace—although that’s not entirely true for its latest headset, Quest Pro.
Meta published a quick explainer video recently showing off how local multiplayer works between two Quest Pros. Here’s the gist, although you can catch the explanation in the video below as well:
To track the room and superimpose virtual imagery over your physical environment in mixed reality, Quest Pro generates point clouds which can be shared with other Quest Pros. Users can decide whether they share point cloud data, Meta says in the informational clip, although it’s notably done by using Meta’s servers as a middleman.
This is a fairly substantial change from how local multiplayer works on Quest 2—or doesn’t work—as games typically require some shared room marker that is used to calibrate the relative positions of players within a pre-defined space. This sort of ad hoc local multiplayer can provide variable results in terms of overall ‘avatar-to-person’ tracking fidelity, but by being able to sync up point clouds, you should (in practice) have the highest level of positional accuracy between two players.
Meta (vis-a-vis Facebook) has been talking about colocation on Quest for a while now. Starting in 2018, the company showed off an arena-scale multiplayer prototype based on VR shooter Dead & Buried, which we hoped would eventually lead to the company opening up colocation services for the Quest platform. Around one year later, the company published code in the Oculus Unity Integration pointing to a colocation API for Quest, although we still seem no closer to colocation on Quest 2.
It’s interesting to see the company is only allowing colocation on Quest Pro for now, its $1,500 mixed reality headset launched in late October. Meta still seems to be refining its value proposition of Quest Pro, and it seems colocation services are very much a ‘pro’ feature.
Among documents released by the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) earlier this week is a claim that Meta’s VR studio Camouflaj, the developers behind Marvel’s Ironman VR, have also planned a Batman VR app for release on Quest.
The apparent leak was found by Janko Roettgers, formerly of Protocol and Variety. The document in whole can be viewed here.
“In September 2022, Meta acquired Camouflaj, which currently developing Ironman and Batman VR apps for Quest.”
The information comes as a part of wider antitrust investigation into Meta’s acquisition of Within, the studio behind the VR fitness app. You can read more about that here.
Last we heard from Camouflaj before the acquisition by Meta, the studio said it had “exciting things on the horizon,” maintaining it was still “all-in on VR.”
Over the past two years Meta hasn’t sold its VR headsets in Germany due to an ongoing antitrust suit in that country that alleges the forced linkage between its virtual reality products and Facebook was an anticompetitive practice. Now it seems that’s about to change, as regulators have intimated that Meta may be free and clear soon to resume sales in Germany.
As reported by German VR publication MIXED, residents of Europe’s largest economy will soon be able to order Quest 2 and Quest Pro, which are both set to be available in-country by the end of this year.
After the sales halt in September 2020, Germany-based customers had to import Meta VR devices, which was typically done by buying from online retailers based in neighboring European countries, such as France’s Amazon.fr or Italy’s Amazon.it.
Resuming sales in Germany is directly linked to Meta’s backtracking on forced Facebook logins in August. Andreas Mundt, President of Germany’s Federal Cartel Office which is tasked with antitrust enforcement in that country, calls this a “welcome development,” although the process is still not concluded.
Here’s Mundt’s full statement, translated to English:
With Meta’s digital ecosystem created with a very large number of users, the company is the key player in the social media space. Meta also has a significant position in the growing VR market. If the use of VR glasses were only possible for Facebook or Instagram members, this could severely affect competition in both areas. Meta has responded to our concerns and offered a solution by setting up a separate Meta account to use the Quest glasses. Despite this welcome development, we are not concluding the process today. First of all, we want to continue to accompany the actual design of the options for users as well as topics of the merging and processing of user data from the various meta-services.
Although a Meta spokesperson tells MIXED that both Quest 2 and the new Quest Pro will be available in-country at some point this year, the exact date is unclear.
Thanks to our reader Blaexe for pointing out that it wasn’t a block, but an anticipatory halt on Meta’s part during the ongoing antitrust suit. We’ve changed wording to reflect this.
