While Mark Zuckerberg has been more than vocal about his company’s focus on the metaverse, even renaming to make this direction clear, Google has been working on a secret AR headset, with 300 staff “tucked away in a building that requires special keycard access and non-disclosure agreements”.
This is revealed in a new feature on The Verge, where “two people familiar with the project who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission” spilled information about the team working on it, if not the actual product.
Project Iris is headed up by Clay Bavor, who reports directly to CEO Sundar Pichai. The team has plans to hire “hundreds” of new staff for the project, in addition to the core team of roughly 300 currently managing the project.
Google plans to have the AR headset on the market by 2024 – it currently looks like ski googles, according to the insiders, so it seems the design is still a way off.
Last October, on an earnings call, Pichai confirmed he was “thinking through” AR, which he called a “major area of investment for us.”