Google is of course a massive company that hires new employees constantly, whether through foo.bar or more traditional methods, and its hiring activities don’t usually makes the news. However, when Google X, the branch that creates some of Google’s most ambitious projects, puts out a job posting, people tend to notice, and this one is particularly interesting.
The job description is labeled as simply for a “Computer Graphics Engineer” but the interesting bit is at the end, where it specifies “Special Projects.” Just what those projects are and why they’re so special isn’t clear, but the requirements list a proficiency with OpenGL, video synchronization, and the ability to create an “inspection mechanism to read and correct for optical variation.”
And the last requirement is the one that has people really taking note of the listing, where it says the applicant will “work closely with the Virtual Reality team at Google to integrate any of the developments.”
Up until now, Google’s VR ambitions have been limited to Cardboard VR (pictured), a DIY system that allows you to build or buy an inexpensive virtual reality setup powered by your smartphone. This job posting is for a Google X position, however, a special branch of Google described as a “Moonshot Factory.”
So what is a moonshot factory? According to Google, it’s “where uncomfortably ambitious, world-changing new ideas such as self-driving cars, Internet from balloons and smart contact lenses are developed and taken out into the world.” What that has to do with Virtual Reality is more than a bit unclear, but hopefully it means a new, more ambitious virtual reality project from X, although the timeline is equally mysterious.
If anything, the news of a full-time VR developer for Google X raises more questions than it answers. Whatever the engineers are churning out over at the moonshot factory, it’s likely we won’t see it for years.
