Google ATAP

Google's Advanced Technology and Projects group (ATAP) is a skunkworks team and in-house technology incubator, created by former DARPA director Regina Dugan. ATAP is similar to X, but works on shorter projects, granting project leaders only two years in which to move a project from concept to proven product. According to Dugan, the ideal ATAP project combines technology and science, requires a certain amount of novel research, and creates a marketable product within the two-year time frame. Historically, the ATAP team was born at Motorola and kept when Google sold Motorola to Lenovo; for this reason, ATAP ideas have tended to involve mobile hardware technology.

The team embodies principles that Google VP Dugan used at DARPA, including the two-year deadline that forces everything to move briskly. One of these principles is to create small teams of high performers. Another is to make use of resources outside the organizational box; ATAP has worked with hundreds of partners in more than twenty countries, including schools, corporations, startups, governments, and nonprofits. Standing contracts are in place with a number of top-flight schools, such as Stanford, MIT, and Caltech, to facilitate rapid research arrangements when needed.

Although ATAP has occasionally publicized the number of projects in progress, the individual projects are kept secret until they are nearing maturity and it's time to start developing public interest. At that point, they've historically been announced at the annual Google I/O developer conference. Some of the announced projects to date are described below.

The Project Tango team was led by computer scientist Johnny Lee, a core contributor to Microsoft's Kinect. Project Tango is a computer-vision technology that allows mobile devices to detect their position relative to the world around them, without requiring GPS or other external signals. This enables the use of mobile phones and tablets for indoor navigation, 3D mapping, measurement of physical spaces, recognition of known environments, augmented reality, and windows into virtual 3D worlds.

...
Wikipedia