Google’s ATAP will showcase wearables that might “blow your socks off,” literally

Another gem found hiding in plain sight in the I/O conference schedule that Google received yesterday is a tantalizing clue of what ATAP is preparing.

In case that acronym doesn’t ring any bells, how about DARPA? Regina Dugan, the current head of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group, used to ran DARPA, the Pentagon branch in charge with developments of “high risk, high reward” projects that most often than not sound like the stuff of sci-fi.

Now Dugan is pursuing the same type of futuristic, borderline crazy projects at Google. Project Tango (the 3D sensing technology) and the Project Ara modular smartphone are two of ATAP’s best known projects.

For Google I/O, the ATAP team is promising some crazy new wearables. More precisely:

“wearables that we hope will blow your socks off. (We mean this more literally than you might think…)”

ATAP’s goal for its new projects?

“break the tension between the ever-shrinking screen sizes necessary to make electronics wearable and our ability to have rich interactions with them”

Intriguing! Oh, and there’s also a new Spotlight Story directed by Justin Lin, of Fast and Furious fame. That’s a far cry from the cute animations previously featured on the project, so we’re excited to see what this “full 360 with 3D soundsphere” film looks like.

ATAP’s session will be livestreamed on May 29 from 9AM Pacific and is titled “A little badass. Beautiful. Tech and human. Love and work. ATAP.” But then again, we wouldn’t expect anything else from a group whose tagline is “We like epic shit.”