Google X, stylized as Google[x], is a semi-secret facility run by Google dedicated to making major technological advancements. It is located about a half mile from Google's corporate headquarters, the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California. Work at the lab is overseen by Sergey Brin, one of Google's co-founders, and by scientist and entrepreneur Astro Teller. Teller says that they aim to improve technologies by a factor of 10, and to develop "science fiction-sounding solutions."
Projects
Reportedly worked on at the lab is a list of 100 projects pertaining to future technologies such as a self-driving car, augmented reality glasses, contact lenses that monitor glucose in tears, internet service via balloons in the stratosphere, a neural network that uses semi-supervised learning, enabling speech recognition and extraction of objects from video - for instance detecting if acat is in a frame of video, and the Web of Things.
A number of articles have speculated as to the types of projects that are encompassed by Google X Lab as well as the motivations for such projects.
Google has repeatedly denied working on a space elevator, despite repeated press claims originating with what appeared to be speculation by a third party in The New York Times in 2011.
While Google X projects are often referred to as "moonshots" within the company, not all so-described moonshots are part of Google X. For example, Calico, Google's life extension project, is considered a moonshot but is not a part of Google X. The same is true of Google's project to build robots for businesses.
In October 2013, the existence of four Google barges was revealed, with the vessels registered under the dummy corporation By And Large. Two of the barges have a superstructure whose construction has been kept under the utmost secrecy, while speculations indicate they could be used as marketing for, and stores for, Google Glass.
Project Glass
Project Glass is a research and development program by Google to develop an augmented reality head-mounted display (HMD). The intended purpose of Project Glass products would be the hands-free displaying of information currently available to most smartphone users, and allowing for interaction with the Internet via natural language voice commands.
Google driver-less car
The Google driverless car is a project by Google that involves developing technology for driverless cars. The project is currently being led by Google engineer Sebastian Thrun, director of theStanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-inventor of Google Street View. Thrun's team at Stanford created the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and itsUS$2 million prize from the United States Department of Defense. The team developing the system consisted of 15 engineers working for Google, including Chris Urmson, Mike Montemerlo, and Anthony Levandowski who had worked on the DARPA Grand and Urban Challenges.
The U.S. state of Nevada passed a law in June 2011 concerning the operation of driverless cars in Nevada. Google had been lobbying for driverless car laws. The license was issued to a Toyota Prius modified with Google's experimental driver-less technology. In August 2012, the team announced that they have completed over 300,000 autonomous-driving miles accident-free, typically have about a dozen cars on the road at any given time, and are starting to test them with single drivers instead of in pairs.
Project Loon
Project Loon is a project that aims to bring internet access to everyone by creating an internet network of balloons flying through the stratosphere.
Google Contact Lens
Google Contact Lens were announced on January 16, 2014 with the goal of allowing diabetics to continually check their glucose levels using a non-intrusive method.
Subsidiaries
On 23 May 2013 Google X acquired Makani Power, a US company which develops tethered wings/kites with mounted wind turbines for low cost renewable energy generation.
Campus
A reporter from Bloomberg Business week visited the site in 2013 and described it as "ordinary two-story red-brick buildings about a half-mile from Google’s main campus. There's a burbling fountain out front and rows of company-issued bikes, which employees use to shuttle to the main campus."
(Source: Wikipedia)
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