[optymizer]

In my experience with a mesh wi-fi project, physical devices come with real world physical side-effects: accidents happen, devices go offline, or get stolen, or knocked off the walls/shelves, a physical location needs to be negotiated with the space owner (less of a problem if the number of venues is in the hundreds as we have business people to handle those at scale), dust, water, heat, animals, etc.

It's not a big problem if you want to equip one venue or a couple, but scaling the operation means these side-effects scale too, and we had to work on solutions to handle those, rather than working on our core competency of mesh wi-fi. Unsurprisingly the project was scrapped despite being technically feasible on a small scale - we had a couple of sites.

Virtualizing a physical space gives you more flexibility. It keeps most problems in the software engineering space and limits physical requirements (eg someone might still need to walk around an airport to update the model, but I can't think of any other major ones).

That said, AI is sexy (right now), Meta is heavy in the MR space and the tech is reusable, even if it's not the most energy-efficient solution.

(disclaimer: just my personal ramblings, I don't work on project Aria)