Amazon has posted several job openings for an unannounced augmented reality-virtual reality product. Enough to design a “magical and useful consumer product, (…) entirely new”, promises the company.
We are not yet talking about metaverses at Amazon, but we are gradually placing all our pawns to design a vast mesh as obvious.
With a powerful voice assistant already in your pocket (Alexa), devices to challenge him (Echo), compatibility with more and more players in connected objects, and even screens to interact (Echo Show), there was no lack more than an alternative or additional reality to pilot all this little world even more. And it looks good in the drawers.
“A magical, useful and new product”
The website Protocol spotted several job offers posted in recent weeks by the e-commerce giant. And they all revolve around various profiles for an “unannounced” augmented and/or virtual reality device. Thus, computer vision managers, designers, program or product managers, technologists and various scientific positions are sought, notes the media, which speaks of a “substantial” team sought.
The people sought will then be called upon to develop “an advanced XR (mixed reality, editor’s note) research concept for a new magical and useful consumer product”. Some offers refer to an entirely new development effort», with the development of code for prototypes destined to enter mass production. Several offers also mentioned “a unique connected home product“.
However, augmented or virtual reality hasn’t really been the company’s fad lately. In 2013, a prototype of augmented reality glasses was born, but it did not give rise to a product marketed thereafter. Amazon released its Echo Frames in the United States some time ago, but they are not used for AR or VR, above all to embed Alexa.
You have to go back a few years to find traces of the idea of augmented reality without glasses or the like at Amazon. This then went through modules fixed to the ceiling or elsewhere, such as projectors, which would make it possible to use augmented reality without glasses, but with sensors and cameras. This had remained in the state of a simple concept, recallsProtocol.
Augmented reality without accessories?
Introduced last year, the Amazon Glow, a kind of interactive video projector, is perhaps the idea of augmented reality that comes closest to a consumer device. This is a way to animate a chat between children and their family for example, and to play the augmented reality projection card on a table or the ground to interact on both sides.
The future will tell us what was hidden behind these mysterious job advertisements. This will no doubt have to do with the Futures Design task force recently set up at Amazon to envision the future. It is headed by Kharis O’Connell, who previously worked on designing Google’s AR operating system and the Meta View augmented reality headset. Suffice to say that there is really something going on in another reality at Amazon.
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