Alphabet X, which launches moonshot projects, comes with Wolverine. This gives the wearer superhuman good hearing.
Wolverine, a hearing aid for healthy people
Many people with impaired hearing wear hearing aids. But what if your hearing aid allows you to hear just as superhumanly well as, say, a dog, so that you can still follow a conversation fifty meters away? That’s kind of the idea behind Wolverine.
The device is in the form of a sticker that you place close to your ear. The name comes from the eponymous character from the Marvel superhero series X-Men, who has super sharp hearing.
Wolverine as moonshot project
It has been a bit quiet in recent years around Alphabet X, the part of Google’s parent company Alphabet that deals with so-called Moonshot projects, projects with a distant, outlandish and apparently unachievable goal.
One of these top secret projects, Wolverine, must give humans a superhuman sense of hearing. Very useful if, for example, you want to detect problems in a pipe installation or keep an eye on the environment. Or eavesdropping on the neighbours, probably the most popular application in small villages.
Understanding each other in a busy cafe
The team itself sees the most in “speech segregation”, extracting the voice of your interlocutors from the buzz of dozens of people. Indeed, this would be a welcome accessory in a busy cafe or at a party, for example. If the team behind Wolverine has succeeded in building a working prototype, then of course market research has to be carried out.
Several previous working prototypes, such as Google Loon and Google Glass, have not been developed further, or have been merged into another project. So at this stage it is impossible to say if and when Wolverine will change into the new wearable gadget.
What could you do with this superhuman hearing aid?
It’s fun to speculate. It could well be that Google is thinking of, for example, a link from Wolverine to the Pixel smartphone. The powerful Tensor AI chip on board the Pixel 8 smartphone could then perform advanced noise filtering functions, which will relieve the lightweight portable device. And this is just the tip of the iceberg of many possibilities.
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