Augmented reality company Meta has sued a former employee for stealing trade secrets regarding its technology and market strategy. The startup filed suit in California yesterday against departed head of optics Zhangyi Zhong and his new AR company DreamWorld, as well as 20 unnamed defendants. It alleges that Zhong “shamelessly leveraged” his time at Meta to misappropriate its “technologies, supply chain, manufacturing methods, and relationships, as well as business, investment and market strategies,” using them for his own company and prototype.
Zhong worked for Meta for 16 months before departing in July of 2016. DreamWorld announced its first product, called the DreamGlass, last month. The headset is supposed to cost under $350, compared to the $949 Meta 2 headset, which started shipping last year.
According to Meta, that was possible because Zhong was heavily involved in developing the Meta 2, and had access to Meta’s extensive research about augmented reality, as well as information about its relationships to manufacturers. It alleges that he quit without notice under the false pretense of a medical condition, then secretly founded DreamWorld under a new nickname and began running it through an intermediary, which Meta believes is his wife or girlfriend. Thus, the company could create “a product that took Meta years of trial and error to prototype in a fraction of the time, with a fraction of the effort.”
Meta’s suspicions were raised by an early UploadVR article about DreamGlass, which described “a Meta-esque optics system” and expressed surprise at the headset’s low cost and aggressive release timeline. UploadVR said that the headset was smaller and lighter than the Meta 2, but that its tracking system performed significantly worse. Meta’s headset is designed to be tethered to a PC, while DreamGlass plugged into an Android phone. The lawsuit says that as an optical engineer, Zhong had “no technical experience” with aspects of the headset that appeared to be taken from Meta.