One of the "daughter" companies of the Californian giant is working on a top secret plan to give people superhuman hearing.
X Moonshot, the company of Alphabet (also Google's “mom”) 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 ultimate goal of the Wolverine project is to develop a 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 chance that its final version is different from the current one, which involves the use of a large hearing aid positioned as a headphone. Superhuman hearing, superhuman device? I don't think so.
How will it end?
There's reason to believe Wolverine will fare better than Loon or Google Glass (which may be Moonshot Factory's most famous flop). Sources inside the company say some prominent names are associated with the project, including former vice president of Starkey Hearing Technologies Simon Carlile and the former director of ARPA-E Jason Rugolo.
In summary, even if we do not know how the "Wolverine" device will be or when it will go on sale, it is very likely, somewhat as it was for Neuralink, that we will hear about it.
