Amazon Web Services Quietly Forms a Mixed Reality Team, But What Is It Building?

Nat Levy, reporting for GeekWire: Amazon is building a new "two pizza team" within Amazon Web Services focused on mixed-reality technology, another sign that the cloud powerhouse is expanding its reach and branching out into new areas. AWS isn't talking publicly about the initiative, but a job posting for a software engineer sheds some light on the team's goals. The posting says the company is "building a set of services, and platform to bring AWS and Amazon into the world of Mixed Reality." The company wants engineers with experience in "Computer Vision, 3D objects, rendering and data storage by designing, developing and testing software solutions." The posting further states that "applications would include real-time 3D modeling, image and video stream processing all within a scalable distributed environment." The posting calls the group a "true start-up within AWS (a real two pizza team)." The two-pizza term goes back to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and his well-known rule that any team or meeting that can't be fed with two pizzas is too large.

A working Data Pipeline infrastructure

[hyperar]

I'm amazed on how unreliable it is...

Mixed reality

[invid]

I guess mixed reality is the new term for augmented reality.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[TheFakeTimCook]

Either that or they're going to start publishing a newspaper that contains news aimed at both Trump supporters and everyone else, making 50% of it fake news. Hence "mixed reality"

Their Catchphrase: "Nothing but the Alternate Facts"

Re:

[phantomfive]

Magic Leap created such a convincing tech demo video [youtube.com] that every CEO got sold on it and now wants to build it. Apple's Tim Cook got caught up in it too [theverge.com].

It kind of reminds me of 3D desktops environments: cool in principle, lame in practice. Maybe someone will figure out a way to make it non-lame.

Re:

[KGIII]

I had some amusement with this:

Link. [sourceforge.net]

Check out the video - it's kinda cool.

Re: Mixed reality

[KGIII]

Did you watch the demo vid? It is frivolous eye candy and mostly pointless. It's kinda neat.

Re:

[phantomfive]

Yeah, all you really need is a terminal, and actually "echo" mode on is kind of a waste of bandwidth.

Re:

[KGIII]

I am not that hardcore.

This pizza has gone stale...

[__aaclcg7560]

A new Slashdot with an AI to select relevant news stories..

Re:

[ls671]

Watch you wish for. /. management could decide to extent it to comments...

"Two-pizza team"?

[93 Escort Wagon]

What is the specific reference? Just using Seattle-area joints, this could be all over the place...

Mod Pizza: Max team size is apparently two people

Pagliacci's: Six to eight people, depending on how hungry they are

Northlake Tavern: Two pizzas can easily feed a dozen, maybe more

So which is it, Bezos?

Re:

[kiviQr]

Two-pizza team is a temp pulling an all nighter!

Re:

[drinkypoo]

What is the specific reference? Just using Seattle-area joints, this could be all over the place...

When one encounters an unfamiliar phrase, one uses google. The top result for a google search for "two-pizza team" [idonethis.com] unsurprisingly explained quite adequately.

I thought it was dumb not to explain it too, but it's also dumb not to just ask google

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

You're taking this way too seriously.

Re:

[dasgoober]

Dunno what the hell he's talking about; just the hardware group alone will be more than 2 pizzas

Amazon Goggles

[randomErr]

Coming soon: a high speed intranet that makes Google Glasses actually work... at an decent price. Alexis, map out the closest taco stand.

The real threat is GCP

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Rather than farting around with this, Amazon should be getting ready for a price war with Google by shedding expenses.

Re: The real threat is GCP

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Your company might not be large enough to attract GCP Enterprise pricing then. In the Fortunes Google has dropped its pants on server virtualization (e.g. 30% lower than EC2) to buy market share.

So then 3 people

[ayesnymous]

is too large of a meeting.

Fakeish News?

[Plumpaquatsch]

What else is "Mixed Reality" supposed to mean? They add alternative facts to mostly factual stories.

Re:

[Plumpaquatsch]

On second thought: they auto-write content for Amazon's fiction departments by ripping stories from the headlines and automatically changing names and places so they won't get sued.