The company has shown its hardware manufacturing capabilities in virtual reality (VR) goggles -the Oculus Rift, through its subsidiary, Oculus VR.
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The new facility, dubbed Area 404, has opened in Menlo Park, Facebook’s existing California campus, and is created to help its teams work more closely and share ideas, rather than being distributed around the globe. This new 22,000-square-foot lab is located in Facebook’s bayside Menlo Park headquarters, and it’s outfitted with state-of-the-art machine tools and test equipment, Facebook bloggers Spencer Burns and Michael Greaves wrote.
In order to get virtual reality right, he added, Facebook needed to refine hardware such as lenses and processors.
The new space will be divided into prototype workshops and an electrical engineering lab.
The company’s various teams have for years been making smaller, more limited advancements in the way they perform this process, mainly to design servers, racks, and other data center hardware Facebook began building in-house back in 2011. Go here to view a listing of the tools being used in the hardware lab. The lab houses a variety of highly specialized and, in some cases, potentially unsafe equipment such as a water jet that can cut through sheets of steel or stone several inches thick. Now, the lab is nearly complete and mostly operational, as it is ready to take part in the 10-year road map of Zuckerberg that sees Facebook becoming more involved in markets such as internet connectivity, virtual reality and artificial intelligence in the future. It has Oculus facilities in the Seattle area, an Aquila (drone) hanger in the United Kingdom, and a laser communications lab in Southern California, to name just a few.
Other departments will keep their existing labs, but Area 404 is meant to be a centralized place for collaboration.
Now, for the first time, it has allowed cameras behind the doors of its new hardware-developing laboratory: Area 404. Over there, several heavy-duty milling machines, a couple of precision lathes, a scanning electron microscope and a computer tomography (CT) scanner.
While the latter efforts are viewed as critical infrastructure for the companies, the two companies’ consumer-oriented hardware products have produced few big successes so far.
In another section of Area 404 Facebook is working on drone technology to beam Wi-Fi Internet to remote areas. In April, Facebook announced that Regina Dugan, formerly head of an advanced projects group at Google, would join Building 8, Facebook’s team on more far-out projects, including hardware.
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The company won’t say how much it spent on the lab, but it took months to build the facility, which is about a third the size of a football field, inside a refitted office building on its main campus.
