OREANDA-NEWS. April 14, 2016. The social network on Wednesday unveiled plans for a new group called Building 8, which will research and develop hardware products that advance Facebook's plan to connect more people to the Internet. The group will be backed by a sizable investment of "hundreds of people and hundreds of millions of dollars" over the next few years, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post.

The team will be led by Regina Dugan, the former head of DARPA, or Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a US government agency charged with developing emerging technologies for the military. She most recently worked at rival Google, where she led the search giant's Advanced Technology and Projects, or ATAP, a secretive lab that developed a modular phone called Project Ara and a tablet dubbed Project Tango.

"Today is a bittersweet day for me," Dugan wrote on her Facebook page. "I am on the one hand, tremendously excited. Building 8 is an opportunity to do what I love most...On the other hand, I am sad to leave the pirates of ATAP."

Facebook isn't a significant player in hardware, but sees products you can hold or touch as a way to achieve its mission of becoming more than a social network. Zuckerberg on Tuesday highlighted three major areas the company wants to expand into: augmented and virtual reality,artificial intelligence and connecting more people to the Internet.