According to a report by Wall Street Journal, Google has renamed its Glass project to Project Aura. The report further says that the Google Glass team now Project Aura, have been hiring engineers, software developers and project managers that earlier worked with Amazon’s Lab126 hardware focused research division. Most of them were apparently laid off after Amazon’s Fire smartphone initiative turned out to be a disaster.
Project Aura is now headed by Ivy Ross who was earlier also at the helm of the Glass Project, though from now on she’ll be reporting to Nest CEO Tony Fadell. While the report also mentions that Project Aura team is now working on something beyond Google Glass, which was apparently revealed by reading the job descriptions of those who’ve been hired on Linkedin.
One of the employees who joined Aura in August after the Fire smartphone debacle, describes the ‘Project Aura’ as “Glass & beyond” on his LinkedIn profile and further added that the team is “building cool wearables.”
Meanwhile, Business Insider also recently reported that former Google Glass lead electrical engineer Adrian Wong, who apparently quit Facebook owned Virtual Reality initiative Occulus Rift, rejoined Google in June. And his LinkedIn profile has a description that reads “G is for Gadgets, Glasses, and Goggles”, which suggests he may also be a part of Project Aura as well.
To recall, the search engine giant stopped selling the initial version of Glass to the general public after protests over privacy concerns as it could record video in public places without anybody even noticing. Moreover, the fact that it was way overpriced at $1500 and didn’t offer that any practical usage, hence the Mountain View, California-based company in January stopped selling the head-mounted gear, with the company’s top management admitting that the device was released ahead of its time.
However, the company still offers a Glass version catering to industries such as health care, energy and manufacturing and is reportedly prepping a new enterprise version of the device.
