Meta Sources New Professionals from Apple and Microsoft

Employees from Apple and Microsoft are jumping ship to Meta as the company continues its endeavors in developing the Metaverse. So far, at least 100 people from Microsoft’s augmented reality (AR) team have left as others moved to the tech and social media giant while Apple is working hard to convince their workers to stay with generous benefits.

Meta has been keen on acquiring professionals who have done work on Microsoft’s HoloLens, particularly because they are considered valuable. Microsoft’s AR venture has been in constant development ever since it was launched in 2016, making it one of the most advanced headsets to date.

Apple, on the other hand, has been offering bonuses ranging between $50,000 and $180,000 as well as enticing stock options to its employees to keep a hold of them. Engineers in silicon design as well as hardware and software operations workers are among the specific groups that have been at the receiving end of these benefits since late December of last year.

Facebook’s rebranding into Meta was a signal that screamed the company’s ambitions to move beyond the social media sphere and into the emerging sector. Reality Labs, its virtual reality business, has significantly been busy following the renaming and they have already successfully developed a prototype for their VR “haptic gloves” in the middle of November 2021.

Of course, the company has also received some notable backlash in its attempt to seemingly dominate the nascent Metaverse. Leaders from within the crypto, NFT, blockchain, and GameFi communities have been among the most vocal about their concerns surrounding Meta’s goals.

Jenny Ta, from Hodl Assets, highlight Meta’s problematic past around data mining, privacy, and content policies, which makes it unfit to lead the charge towards the Metaverse. “In order for him to have a clean slate for Meta, he must step down and he must have a new CEO to run it,” explained Ta.

Microsoft and Apple have both long been looking towards furthering their own Metaverse plans. “The Metaverse enables us to embed computing into the real world and to embed the real world into computing,” remarked Microsoft CEO and executive chairman Satya Nadella. “What’s most important is that we are able to bring our humanity with us, and choose how we want to experience this world.”

Source: CoinTelegraph