Facebook opens lab to build hardware for projects

Facebook has built a lab in its Silicon Valley headquarters, equipped with computerised lathes, industrial mills and tools for making physical goods. The lab would allow engineers to work on some of the high-tech gadgetry needed for the company's long-term plans to connect people through smart devices, virtual-reality headsets and high-flying drones delivering internet signals via laser to remote parts of the world.

According to commentators, much like Google's celebrated X lab, which launches "moonshot" projects such as self-driving cars, Facebook's new research facility demonstrates that in Silicon Valley, leading tech companies did not believe in keeping doing the same thing.

"When you think about connecting the world, you have to build different types of hardware to help people connect," said Jay Parikh, Facebook's head of engineering and infrastructure.

In order to get virtual reality right, he added, Facebook needed to refine hardware such as lenses and processors.

The lab would offer space for engineers to design energy-efficient servers for Facebook data centres, test new laser mounts and drone propellers and perfect  a prototype 360-degree video camera that the social network unveiled at a conference in April.

Facebook announced the opening of the lab dubbed Area 404 yesterday, and invited journalists for a tour.

The new 22,000-square-foot laboratory at its headquarters in Menlo Park, is located at a central building in the main campus of Facebook's headquarters.

Area 404 will focus on such projects as Facebook's solar drones, including the internet-providing Aquila, internet-beaming lasers, virtual reality headsets such as the Oculus Rift and next-generation servers.

The lab takes its name from the "Not Found" error code. The social network's engineers  always needed to prototype the new hardware projects that they were working on, but the resources for the tasks were previously "not found" within Facebook's facilities, hence the name.

With Area 404 operational, Facebook said that it would now be able to do most of the modeling, prototyping and failure analysis of its hardware products in-house.

With the lab, the time needed for each part of the development cycle would be reduced to days from weeks, as the teams working on their projects would not have to turn to third-party vendors for services for these processes.