Meta · 2021–2022

Chartered to explore input beyond the roadmap horizon.

Reality Labs Research works on things that are not products yet. I managed designers and prototypers across its hardware and interaction programs, and ran a cross-discipline group whose charter had no ship date attached to it.

An early stage haptic glove research prototype. Meta, 2021.

Reality Labs Research

exploring next-generation human-computer interaction

Hardware and Interaction Programs

haptics, EMG input, soft robotics, design, perceptual science, applied machine learning, adaptive interfaces

Input Pod Lead

a cross-discipline team chartered to explore beyond the horizon

Nothing shipped for years, and that was the assignment.

Reality Labs Research is the part of Meta that works on things which are not products yet. The nearest thing to a launch was years out, and most of what the organization studied would never become anything at all. That changes what a design leader is for. There is no ship date to organize around, no launch to argue toward, and no user to test with, because the thing a user would use does not exist. What is left is the quality of the questions and whether an organization can agree on which of them matter.

RLR stood up topical pods. I was appointed to lead Input.

I managed designers and prototypers across Reality Labs Research's hardware and interaction programs, spanning haptics, EMG input, soft robotics, perceptual science, applied machine learning, and adaptive interfaces, while sitting on the Design leadership team. Alongside that I led the Input Pod, a cross-discipline team of scientists, researchers and designers. Its charter was to explore input beyond the roadmap horizon. That sentence came with the job. Somebody had already decided the organization needed a group whose work did not have to connect to a date, which is a harder decision for a company to make than it sounds.

An EMG wristband prototype in use. Meta, 2021.

The map of input already existed. The job started where it stopped.

When the Input Pod was formed, there was already a reference inside Reality Labs Research describing where input stood: the modalities under active work, what each one was good for, what the human body would and would not support. It was a carefully crafted document created by a team closer to production roadmaps. What it gave me was a floor. Everything in it was the known state, which meant the far side of it was mine. Beyond the roadmap horizon starts exactly where that document ends.

Humans have more than thirty senses. Input was being designed around two.

A catfish tastes with its skin. Humans have high-resolution vision across roughly one percent of the visual field and reconstruct the rest. The Input Pod ran a continuous dive-deep on human and animal sensation and perception, and each session was an argument rather than a curiosity. If touch can be simulated well enough to be trusted, what can be done with it that a screen cannot do. What happens when senses are combined, extended, or deliberately warped. Whether you could taste something by watching someone else touch it. Every one of those questions pointed at an input channel no program had claimed.

Images generated to illustrate future input scenarios, 2022.

We put every input channel on one board against how close it was to real.

Provocations are cheap. The work is turning them into something a research organization can act on. In August 2022 I ran a series of cross-functional working sessions that put input on a single board: the channels down one axis, eyes and hands and ears and body, and maturity across the other, from what exists only in a lab to what has already gone mainstream. Every cell had to carry a real example and the story of how that example moved across the spectrum, or it did not belong on the board. The question underneath was how social and cultural change pulls a technology into existence, and where each input channel sat on that path. What came out of it was the pod's own account of where input could go: the potential futures, the possible ones, and the preferable ones, each with the modalities it would require and the value it would have to create for anyone to want it.

The framework the working sessions ran on, redrawn with public examples.

I asked Meta's own builders what they would make with life-like touch.

Research organizations invent use cases for the technology they are already building. It is the most natural failure mode there is, and it is expensive, because the invented use case never argues back. In June 2022 I proposed a first-party use-case and voice-of-customer research program for the haptics work, and then ran it. The participant frame put Meta's own builders on one axis, the app teams and the Horizon platforms and the game studios, and core drivers on the other: connection, expression, entertainment, productivity. Two questions ran through every session. What someone would make with life-like touch, and how they would use it to make the things they already make.

Prototype haptic gloves used to shake hands in VR. Meta, 2021.

The role ended. The questions did not.

My role ended in the November 2022 reduction, along with thirteen percent of the company. Research access ends the day the badge does, so I have no copy of what the pod or programs finished. What I know is what came out with me. The wrist-based interaction program Meta had been describing publicly since 2021 became the neural band it shipped later, and every product I have worked on since has been judged against the same question the Input Pod was chartered to ask: what is the input actually made of, and which part of the human being is doing the work.

"I am impressed with structure you bring to breaking down problems and desire to jump into problem spaces that can be intimidating."

James Tichenor, Design Leadership, Reality Labs Research, Meta

Meta, Reality Labs Research. November 2021 to November 2022. Research Design Manager. Managed designers and prototypers across Reality Labs Research's hardware and interaction programs, among them the haptic glove, haptic wristband, EMG input, adaptive interfaces, and headset perception, and ran their staffing. Ran the Input Pod on the futures of human-computer input, and proposed and drove the first-party research program behind the haptics pillar's strategy.