14 DAY TRIAL // Google's X Labs are responsible for Google Glass, the self-driving cars are also being developed there, but that's about everything we know. Google does say it has several projects and technologies under investigation there, but won't reveal much about them.
That's by design, Google says. Astro Teller, the head of the Google X division, wants his colleagues to not be afraid of failing. In fact, he says, they fail quite a lot.
Making the projects they work on more visible would put too much pressure and stifle innovation.
Teller did talk about some of the things Google X is up to, beyond Glass, the self-driving cars and the neural network project we've already heard about.
He revealed that Google Maps was able to offer interior maps and crucially location inside buildings thanks to an innovation by Google X.
GPS doesn't work inside buildings and other methods used for determining location on mobile devices, like triangulating the signal from cell towers or WiFi routers, are unreliable.
A team at Google X was able to come up with a way of determining location that didn't require any new hardware but which is also accurate within 2.5 meters (10 feet), down from 25 meters.
But the project has graduated from X Labs and moved to the Geo team, which is now perfecting it. X Labs is a place for moonshots, not established projects.
In that vein, Google will be unveiling another project to graduate in a month or so. Teller didn't provide many details on this next project, but did say that it had to do with "control systems."
Google's X Labs is an important part of the company, if only because it shows it's still focused on big ideas and wild projects, even though not much has come out of it just yet.