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Meta’s Reality Labs cuts sparked fears of a ‘VR winter’

admin — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 03:11:09 +0000

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg tries on Orion AR glasses at the Meta Connect annual event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, U.S., September 25, 2024. REUTERS/Manuel Orbegozo

Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters

Meta‘s deprioritizing virtual reality in favor of artificial intelligence and Internet-connected smart glasses has chilled the industry, leading to concerns about its future.

“I can see how it feels like a VR winter,” said Jessica Young, an independent VR content creator specializing in Horizon Worlds, Meta’s virtual social network.

The social media giant last week laid off 10% of employees who work within its Reality Labs unit, with the cuts centering on VR-related initiatives like the Quest VR headsets, CNBC reported. Teams working on Horizon Worlds were hit hard and some in-house studios were shuttered. Approximately 1,000 jobs were cut, CNBC reported.

The move was part of the company’s effort to redirect Reality Labs investments from VR to AI and wearable devices like the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses that are co-produced with EssilorLuxottica, a spokesperson for the social media company said in a statement last week. Meta declined to comment further beyond its previous statement.

Meta’s reduced investment in VR is notable considering how much the company has helped grow the industry since its $2 billion acquisition of Oculus in 2014. The company became synonymous with VR when CEO Mark Zuckerberg changed its name from Facebook to Meta, representing the founder’s obsession with a future of digital worlds referred to as the metaverse. Since late 2020, Meta’s Reality Labs division has logged over $70 billion in cumulative losses.

Zuckerberg’s sudden reversal has some VR developers worried about their future prospects. While they said they don’t see Meta killing its VR efforts, a major shift appears to be underway.

Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer and head of Reality Labs at Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Thursday, Sept. 18, 2025.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Meta traditionally announces new Quest VR headsets during its annual Connect conference in the fall, but in 2025, the company skimped on VR hardware. Instead, Meta introduced its $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses that contain a single, built-in digital screen.

“If Meta’s not putting out a new headset for another year or two, it’s going to feel stale,” Young said. “It already kind of does.”

Since the layoffs, Meta tech chief Andrew Bosworth has been vocal that the social media giant is not abandoning VR.

“We’re still continuing to invest heavily in this space, but obviously, VR is growing less quickly than we hoped,” Bosworth told tech newsletter Sources. “And so you want to make sure that your investment is right-sized.”

Bosworth this week also circulated a post by Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey, who on Sunday wrote on X that Meta still employs the “largest team working on VR by about an order of magnitude.”

Although Luckey said that he feels “really bad for the people impacted” by the layoffs, the Reality Labs changes represent “a good thing thing for the long-term health of the industry, especially the ongoing incentives.”

‘The market has spoken’

Market research firm IDC said in a December report that a major transition is occurring in the so-called Extended Reality, or XR, device segment. This category includes VR and so-called mixed-reality headsets that allow users to switch between virtual environments and see their surroundings outside the helmet. The category also counts AI-powered smart glasses and more powerful versions with digital displays.

IDC projects the XR device category to have grown 41.6% year-over-year to 14.5 million units shipped for 2025. But that growth has nothing to do with VR and mixed-reality headsets — those shipments are expected to drop 42.8% to 3.9 million in 2025. The rest of this XR category, which includes AI glasses with and without displays, is projected to grow 211.2% year-over-year to 10.6 million units shipped for 2025.

Jitesh Ubrani, a research manager for market analyst firm IDC, characterized the VR headset market as niche and appealing to only a small segment of video gamers. Average consumers seem uninterested in wearing “big, bulky headsets” for lengthy VR sessions like much of the tech industry hoped for roughly a decade ago, he said.

“The market has spoken,” Ubrani said. “There are certain niche audiences that will continue to use these headsets, but it’s not going to be broadly appealing.”

Visitors experience the new AR+AI glasses flagship product at the XREAL booth at WAIC 2025 in Shanghai, China, on July 27, 2025.

Costfoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Andrew Eiche, the CEO of the Google-owned VR gaming studio Owlchemy Labs, said it was always misguided to think VR was on the cusp of having its breakthrough smartphone moment. He called it a “strategic mistake” to compare VR headsets to iPhones

The VR market, Eiche said, more closely resembles old-school Atari video game consoles that were popular before sales crashed during an infamous 1983 gaming market meltdown. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that Nintendo consoles helped revive the market, laying the groundwork for the overall industry to balloon to the massive sector it is today.

“Lot of tech people thought [VR] was going to be instantly amazing, and the same thing’s happening with AI,” Eiche said about the tech industry’s pivot to the latest craze. “When you’re looking at long-term technologies, VR is not going anywhere.”

Still, Eiche said that beyond Meta’s layoffs, other VR studios have also recently downsized as part of a broader video game industry slump. Because Quest is the dominant VR headset on the market, its app store is a key distribution channel for third-party VR.

Making matters worse, Eiche said that Meta’s Horizon Worlds push came at the expense of third-party developers who were trying to find visibility among Quest users.

“We’re at the mercy of Meta,” Eiche said, adding that it “creates a situation where if Meta pulls back, we all pull back.”

Eiche said he’s optimistic that the upcoming Steam Frame wireless VR headset from gaming company Valve will help the market, as well as the recent entries of other devices like the Samsung Galaxy XR, which debuted in October, and Apple’s Vision Pro.

But Apple’s entry into the VR space in February 2024 hasn’t done much to move the needle, and in January, IDC said that Apple’s Chinese manufacturing partner Luxshare stopped producing new Vision Pro headsets, signaling a lack of widespread consumer demand. Still, Ubrani said that Apple’s $3,499 spatial computing headset has found some footing as a business tool.

“Apple did do well in selling to a lot of developers, but they also sold into some very big companies,” Ubrani said.

VR’s hope shifts to the enterprise market

“There were certain quarters where Apple beat Meta in enterprise,” Ubrani said, due in part to the iPhone-maker’s experience selling devices to businesses.

The enterprise VR market may not be as glamorous as its consumer counterpart, but it represents an area where IDC has “seen slow but upwards movement, because companies are realizing that there is great ROI attached with deploying these headsets.”

As part of Meta’s Reality Labs cuts, the company said in a support page that it would end its Horizon managed services program that was for businesses that used Quest headsets for internal tasks like virtual employee trainings.

Meta failed to realize “how big VR could be if they adopted the bigger picture outside of gaming,” said Sean Mann, CEO of the startup RP1, which develops a “metaverse browser” for people to access virtual and augmented reality environments.

As Meta downsizes its VR ambitions and steers Horizon Worlds to be a mobile-focused online gaming platform like Roblox, Young said she plans to keep creating experiences on the platform.

Young has been able to make a living by getting paid by other Horizon developers to create trailers to promote experiences available to users on the service. She’s also earned money from Meta by winning Horizon-related competitions intended to help improve the overall platform.

But Young said she’s less enthusiastic about Horizon’s mobile push, because there was something special about the platform during its earlier, VR-centric years, particularly during the Covid era.

“Horizon became a lifeline for people isolated by the pandemic, disability, age or geography,” she said. “Many users who never imagined themselves as creators, who had no background in art or programming, were inspired by their friends to try.”

But Horizon lost is way, and “what’s frustrating now is watching people declare it dead without ever having experienced or understanding what it was,” Young said.

WATCH: Meta’s Joel Kaplan on AI investments: Our ambition is to build ‘personal superintelligence.’

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Airlines cancel more than 1,500 flights for winter storm

admin — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 22:58:10 +0000

Travelers at LaGuardia Airport (LGA) in the Queens borough of New York, US, on Friday, Dec. 26, 2025.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Airlines canceled more than 1,500 U.S. flights on Friday ahead of a major winter storm that will put carriers to the test during one of the busiest travel periods of the year.

A winter storm warning is in effect starting Friday afternoon in New York City, New Jersey and Long Island, with snowfall totals potentially reaching 9 inches, much of it falling Friday night, the National Weather Service said.

Over 370 flights, or more than a quarter of the day’s schedule, were canceled as of 5 p.m. ET Friday to and from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, according to flight-tracking site FlightAware. More than 240 were also scrubbed at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, and more than 140 were canceled at Philadelphia International Airport.

Airlines have already canceled a fifth of the departures, or 125 flights from Kennedy Airport on Saturday and 69 flights or 10% of flights scheduled to depart Newark and 20%, or 80 flights from LaGuardia Airport in New York.

American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, JetBlue Airways and other carriers waived change fees for restrictive basic economy tickets and said they won’t charge a difference in fare for any other customers flying in and out of a host of airports in the Northeast U.S.

Customers must travel by the end of the year if they change their flights, the airlines said. Flying as early as possible is likely the best bet with few seats available during the busy Christmas week.

Airlines for America, the industry lobbying group, expects carriers to fly a record 52.6 million people between Dec. 19 and Jan. 5, with this Friday and Sunday among the busiest days.

Airlines generally cancel flights ahead of time for major weather events in the forecast, like blizzards or hurricanes, to avoid planes, connecting travelers and crews from getting stranded and worsening disruptions.

Americans are heating their homes with bitcoin this winter

admin — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 02:55:09 +0000

As winter’s chill settles in across the U.S., and electricity bills become a bigger budgeting issue, most Americans will rely on their usual sources of warmth, such as home heating oil, natural gas, and electric furnaces. But in a few cases, crypto is generating the heat, and if some of the nascent crypto heat industry’s proponents are correct, someday its use as a source within homes and buildings will be much more widespread.

Let’s start with the basics: the computing power of crypto mining generates a lot of heat, most which just ends up vented into the air. According to digital assets brokerage, K33, the bitcoin mining industry generates about 100 TWh of heat annually — enough to heat all of Finland. This energy waste within a very energy-intense industry is leading entrepreneurs to look for ways to repurpose the heat for homes, offices, or other locations, especially in colder weather months.

During a frigid snap earlier this year, The New York Times reviewed HeatTrio, a $900 space heater that also doubles as a bitcoin mining rig. Others use the heat from their own in-home cryptocurrency mining to spread warmth throughout their house.

“I’ve seen bitcoin rigs running quietly in attics, with the heat they generate rerouted through the home’s ventilation system to offset heating costs. It’s a clever use of what would otherwise be wasted energy,” said Jill Ford, CEO of Bitford Digital, a sustainable bitcoin mining company based in Dallas. “Using the heat is another example of how crypto miners can be energy allies if you apply some creativity to their potential,” Ford said.

It’s not necessarily going to save someone money on their electric bill — the economics will vary greatly from place to place and person to person, based on factors including local electricity rates and how fast a mining machine is — but the approach might make money to offset heating costs.

“Same price as heating the house, but the perk is that you are mining bitcoin,” Ford said.

A single mining machine — even an older model — is sufficient. Solo miners can join mining pools to share computing power and receive proportional payouts, making returns more predictable and changing the economic equation.

“The concept of using crypto mining or GPU compute to heat homes is clever in theory because almost all the energy consumed by computation is released as heat,” said Andrew Sobko, founder of Argentum AI, which is creating a marketplace for the sharing of computing power. But he added that the concept makes the most sense in larger settings, particularly in colder climates or high-density buildings, such as data centers, where compute heat shows real promise as a form of industrial-scale heat recapture.

To make it work — it’s not like you can transport the heat somewhere by truck or train — you have to identity where the computing heat is needed and route it to that place, such as co-locating GPUs in environments from industrial parks to residential buildings.

“We’re working with partners who are already redirecting compute heat into building heating systems and even agricultural greenhouse warming. That’s where the economics and environmental benefits make real sense,” Sobko said. “Instead of trying to move the heat physically, you move the compute closer to where that heat provides value,” he added.

Why skeptics say crypto home heating won’t work

There are plenty of skeptics.

Derek Mohr, clinical associate professor at the University of Rochester Simon School of Business, does not think the future of home heating lies in crypto and says even industrial crypto is problematic.

Bitcoin mining is so specialized now that a home computer, or even network of home computers, would have almost zero chance of being helpful in mining a block of bitcoin, according to Mohr, with mining farms use of specialized chips that are created to mine bitcoin much faster than a home computer.

“While bitcoin mining at home — and in networks of home computers — was a thing that had small success 10 years ago, it no longer is,” Mohr said.

“The bitcoin heat devices I have seen appear to be simple space heaters that use your own electricity to heat the room … which is not an efficient way to heat a house,” he said. “Yes, bitcoin mining generates a lot of heat, but the only way to get that to your house is to use your own electricity,” Mohr said.

He added that while running your computer non-stop would generate heat, it has a very low probability of successfully mining a bitcoin block.

“In my opinion, this is not a real opportunity that will work. Instead it is taking advantage of things people have heard of — excess heat from bitcoin mining and profits from mining — and is giving false hope that there is a way for an individual to benefit from this,” Mohr said.

But some experts say more widespread use of plug-and-play, free-standing mining rigs, might make the concept viable in more locations over time. In the least, they say it is worth studying the dual use economic and environmental benefits based on the underlying fact that crypto mining generates significant heat as a byproduct of the computer processing.

“How can we capture the excess heat from the operation to power something else? That could range from heating a home to warming water, even in a swimming pool. As a result, your operating efficiency is higher on your power consumption,” said Nikki Morris, the executive director of the Texas Christian University Ralph Lowe Energy Institute.

She says the concept of crypto heating is still in its earliest stages, and most people don’t yet understand how it works or what the broader implications could be. “That’s part of what makes it so interesting. At Texas Christian University, we see opportunities to help people build both the vocabulary and the business use feasibility with industry partners,” Morris said.

Because crypto mining produces a digital asset that can be traded, it introduces a new source of revenue from power consumption, and the power source could be anything from the grid to natural gas to solar to wind or battery generation, according to Morris. She cited charging an electric vehicle at mixed-use buildings or apartment complexes as an example.

“Picture a similar scenario where an apartment complex’s crypto mining setup produces both digital currency and usable heat energy. That opens the door to distributed energy innovation to a broader stakeholder base, an approach that could complement existing heating systems and renewable generation strategies,” Morris said.

There are many questions to explore, including efficiency at different scales, integration with other energy sources, regulatory considerations, and overall environmental impact, “but as these technologies evolve, it’s worth viewing crypto heating not just as a curiosity, but as a small window into how digital and physical energy systems might increasingly converge in the future,” Morris said.

Testing bitcoin heat in the real world

The crypto-heated future may be unfolding in the town of Challis, Idaho, where Cade Peterson’s company, Softwarm, is repurposing bitcoin heat to ward off the winter.

Several shops and businesses in town are experimenting with Softwarm’s rigs to mine and heat. At TC Car, Truck and RV Wash, Peterson says, the owner was spending $25 a day to heat his wash bays to melt snow and warm up the water.

“Traditional heaters would consume energy with no returns. They installed bitcoin miners and it produces more money in bitcoin than it costs to run,” Peterson said. Meanwhile, an industrial concrete company is offsetting its $1,000 a month bill to heat its 2,500-gallon water tank by heating it with bitcoin.

Peterson has heated his own home for two-and-a-half years using bitcoin mining equipment and believes that heat will power almost everything in the future. “You will go to Home Depot in a few years and buy a water heater with a data port on it and your water will be heated with bitcoin,” Peterson said.

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