20% of Facebook's workforce are working on dominating VR

Facebook rose to power by displacing MySpace, and ever since the company has been paranoid about missing out on the next big thing. The company has generally kept up by buying other companies which have caught the public’s eye, but Facebook would love to own the next big social platform, and for years this was believed to be VR.

Today The Information reports that Facebook is extremely serious about this ambition and that it has 10,000 people working on its group developing augmented and virtual reality devices.

This is not just a large number of people, but a full 1/5th of Facebook’s global workforce, representing an investment of billions.

The ambition is to build a platform independent from Apple and Google, and so far the company has succeeded quite well, with Oculus the dominant VR platform, and its Quest 2 headset the most popular VR headset.

The revelation of the size of Facebook’s bet on VR does lead one to wonder if Facebook is seeing something everyone else are not, or if their vision of the future is just a virtual reality.