One of the "daughter" companies of the Californian giant is working on a top secret plan to give people superhuman hearing.
XMoonshot, the Alphabet company (“parent” also of Google) focused on frontier ideas, is working on a confidential project called “Wolverine”.
The name is a tribute to a peculiar characteristic of the X-Men superhero: his super-developed extrasensory abilities, including superhuman hearing.
Ultimate goal: selective super hearing
The Wolverine project's ultimate goal is to develop technology that allows people to filter out a specific source of noise.
Perhaps guaranteeing capabilities such as concentrating on a single sound source even in the midst of a noisy crowd.
Cocktail party effect
X, the Moonshot Factory, is the same company that some time ago created Waymo, a self-driving car startup, and curated Loon, the (now completed) internet project carried by large helium balloons. In summary: it is not the first of his ambitious undertakings.
The project, according to former employees to the Business Insider website, is still in its early stages. There is a good possibility that its final version will be different from the current one, which involves the use of a large hearing aid positioned like a headset. Superhuman hearing, superhuman device? I don't think so.
How will it end?
There's reason to believe that Wolverine will fare better than Loon or Google Glass (which may be Moonshot Factory's most famous flop). Sources within the company say that some prominent names are associated with the project, including the former vice president of Starkey Hearing Technologies Simon Carlile and the former director of ARPA-E Jason Rugolo.
In summary, although we don't know what the “Wolverine” device will look like or when it will go on sale, it is very likely, a little as it was for Neuralink, that we will hear about it.
