Amazon Is Hiring for a 'Magical' AR/VR Project
Amazon seems to be preparing to expand its investments in VR and AR.
Protocol reports that the company is looking to hire "computer vision scientists, designers, program managers, product managers, researchers, and technologists" to work on what the company described in one job posting as "an advanced XR research concept."
Several of the job postings reportedly mentioned creating something alternately described as a "magical and useful, new-to-world XR consumer product," and "a new-to-world smart-home product." (Although it's possible the postings were referring to different concepts.)
Amazon didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. The company seems to have modified some of the job postings—it removed the reference to an XR research concept, for example—and deleted others since they were cited in Protocol's report on April 18.
Amazon has introduced or previewed a number of mixed-reality products over the years. In 2018, we got a behind-the-scenes look at Amazon Sumerian, an all-in-one development platform that can build AR and VR apps for smartphones and headsets.
In 2020, it released an AR app for its cardboard boxes, and an AR View app from 2017 helped shoppers visualize certain products in their homes. At the height of the pandemic, it also deployed a "Distance Assistance" system aimed at helping Amazon employees remain socially distant using AR. But it hasn't yet formally jumped into the AR/VR hardware space, unless you count its ill-advised 3D Fire Phone.
It's not uncommon for companies to leak information via job postings. We learned that Spotify was curious about hardware when it tried to hire a Senior Product Manager for Hardware, and id Software raised hopesfor a new Quake game when it posted a few
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