Social media firm Facebook has opened Area 404, which is a new 22,000-square-foot laboratory at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
The facility, located at a central building in the main campus of Facebook's headquarters, is filled with massive machines typically found inside manufacturing plants. The lab is where Facebook is planning to carry out fast prototyping and modeling of its new hardware products and their components.
Among the projects that Area 404 will focus on include Facebook's solar drones, including the internet-providing Aquila, internet-beaming lasers, virtual reality headsets such as the Oculus Rift and next-generation servers.
For those wondering, the lab's name is taken from the "Not Found" error code. The engineers of Facebook 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.
With Area 404 operational, Facebook said that it is now able to do most of the modeling, prototyping and failure analysis of its hardware products in-house. This has made it possible for the time needed for each part of the development cycle to be reduced to days from weeks, as the teams working on their projects will no longer have to enlist the services of third-party vendors for these processes.
The machines that make such a feat impossible, however, are considered to be dangerous ones as well. While Facebook provides hardware engineers with the training that they need for certifications and implements precautions, some of the rooms of Area 404 are still considered unsafe, with a room in particular even not allowing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to enter due to the risk involved.
Construction of Area 404 started nine months ago, beginning with a repurposed mailroom located in the company's Building 17. Now, the lab is almost complete and mostly operational, as it is ready to take part in the 10-year road map of Zuckerberg that sees Facebook becoming more involved in markets such as internet connectivity, virtual reality and artificial intelligence in the future.
"When you think about connecting the world, you have to build different types of hardware to help people connect," said Facebook head of engineering and infrastructure Jay Parikh, and with Area 404 almost ready to go full speed ahead, the social network is well on its way to expand further into hardware products.
One such product, the Aquila solar-powered drone, successfully carried out its first test flight last month. Aquila is a part of the ambitious plan of Facebook to provide people from all over the world with internet connections, as the drone is capable of providing internet connections using laser and millimeter wave systems.
