Inside Facebook’s “innovation pop-up”—a giant blue temple of far-out tech

Facebook is more than just a social network these days, and boasts innovations in infrastructure, connectivity, AI, VR, and blue neon lighting.

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What does Facebook mean to you? Friends? Likes? Cat pictures? Painfully overblown humblebrags? Whatever it is that keeps you hooked on the world's largest social network-which now boasts a staggering 1.55 billion monthly users-it's the result of hundreds of hours of research, testing, and development by Facebook.

Over the past couple of years, Facebook has followed in the footsteps of Google and began branching out from its core social network offering, coming up with everything from open-source hardware data centres, to connecting the entire world to the Internet via laser-backhaul drones flying at 60,000 feet. The company has branched out so much from its core offering, that it's worried that even employees might be getting a bit lost.

Enter the Facebook pop-up at London's Bedford Square Garden, a huge conservatory that's packed with everything that the company is working on, from servers, to Internet.org, to AI, to Oculus VR. It's one giant blue temple of far-out tech devoted to the rapidly growing Zuckerberg empire. While the pop-up isn't open to the general public, press were given a quick look-in before it's turned over to invited guests from the tech community, as well as employees that haven't had a chance to check it out while it was in the US.

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