Inside Facebook's 'Area 404' idea factory

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Deep inside Facebook's sprawling campus here is "Area 404," a reference to the error you get when a Web page can't be found.

Engineers gave it that name because it's a space they wanted that didn't exist: a lab outfitted with state-of-the-art testing equipment and heavy machinery where they can turn ideas into prototypes, with the goal of speeding up the cycle of innovation.

It's the latest chapter in the Silicon Valley tradition of building large research labs to engineer the future, from the famous Xerox PARC lab to Google's "moonshot" factory.

Under founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook has made innovation a top priority. The giant social network doesn't just want to buy other people's good ideas, it wants to create its own. The new hardware lab, built from the ground up inside a gutted office building, is the latest high-profile push from Facebook to step on the gas and outpace competitors. Facebook this week gave reporters a rare glimpse into the recently completed lab.

A wide and eclectic array of projects from across Facebook will be housed in the lab: virtual reality hardware gear including the Oculus headset and Facebook Surround 360's camera rig, as well as components for Facebook's solar-powered drone Aquila. Also moving in: Building 8, the hush-hush project run by Regina Dugan, the former head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), who joined Facebook in April from Google.

It's an unexpected sight inside an Internet giant best known for helping its 1.7 billion users keep up with friends and family. The cavernous, highly secure lab with polished surfaces and gleaming concrete floors is divided into two areas: an electrical engineering lab with rows of long desks to test and debug designs and a prototyping workshop with large machine tools. These include an 5-axis water jet that can cut sheets of any material from steel to granite. There's even an electron microscope and a CT scanner to quickly figure out what fried a mother board or a networking switch.

Tinkering with hardware is a throwback to Silicon Valley's roots that stretch to the 1930s with Bill Hewlett and David Packard and the 1970s when Silicon Valley got its name for the cluster of semiconductor companies here. It also marks a groundbreaking new approach for Facebook. Over the years a smattering of isolated labs sprang up with every new project: Oculus' facilities in Seattle, the hangar for the Aquila drone in the UK, a laser communications lab in Southern California.

Jay Parikh, Facebook's head of engineering and infrastructure, believes Facebook can leap ahead by incubating everything in one space where people and ideas commingle. Over time he hopes engineers can crank out in days what used to take weeks or even months.

"It brings together a lot of opportunity for teams across the company to work together, and work on shared problems here together," he says.

In decades past, big companies opened idea factories whose purpose was to invent the future. Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox PARC, was the most heralded. The Palo Alto, Calif. innovation arm of the Xerox Corp. harnessed the brain trust of engineers and programmers to crack hard problems and advance science. The result: they developed critical hardware for the modern personal computer.

Facebook gives sneak peek into sci-fi future

More recently, Internet giants have taken up the mantle. In 2010, Google created a corporate lab, X, to experiment with driverless cars, balloons that deliver the Internet and other speculative pursuits. Microsoft has a "Special Projects" group under the umbrella of its research division. Apple is famous for its top-secret machinations on unannounced products. And this week, home-sharing start-up Airbnb announced Samara, an innovation and design studio within the company.

This next generation of companies are looking to avoid the mistakes of predecessors like Xerox PARC that failed to cash in on their own inventions.

"Ten years ago we were lamenting the end of corporate R&D. The grand old labs were all shutting down and the question was where was the big thinking coming from?" said Silicon Valley forecaster Paul Saffo. "This is a very good sign that large company innovation is very much alive. This could be where next big ideas come from."

Advances in technology are fueling innovation. Today, companies can quickly and cheaply experiment with product designs by using low-cost 3-D printers to make prototypes. With its new lab, Facebook can more quickly turn those prototypes into actual objects.

Facebook's Aquila drone completes first test flight

​"This is a one-of-a-kind lab," says Spencer Burns,  a Facebook model maker who turns engineering designs into functional prototypes.

Facebook broke ground on the hardware lab nine months ago, and when Facebook says it broke ground, it literally broke it. It ripped up the floor, and then used heavy equipment to drive pylons 60 feet into bedrock.

"We are standing on three feet of concrete reinforced by rebar supported by over 100 pylons," Burns says speaking over the constant whirring of the heavy machinery. "This is a serious floor."

Need for such a serious floor is clear when you look at the scale of the equipment sitting on top of it, like the 9-axis mill-turn lathe used for making complex components. It weighs 60,000 pounds.

"It's unorthodox to have a machine this large in an office building like this," Burns says. A column at the top of the lathe moves when the machine operates, coming within an inch or two of grazing the ceiling.

Facebook won't say how much the lab cost. Saffo says it was a smart move even with the drag on the stocks of companies such as Google attempting these speculative "moonshots."

"It's the vision thing. Vision is a hugely important intangible asset for all of these companies," Saffo says. "Researchers doing exciting things is the foundation of that asset."

Follow USA TODAY senior technology writer Jessica Guynn @jguynn