AWS Quietly Forms A Mixed Reality Team

Wait, what? In another sign that the cloud powerhouse is expanding its reach, Amazon has quietly built a mixed reality team within AWS, focused on, well, mixed reality technology.

The company isn’t talking about it just yet.

But some details of the initiative have been revealed in a job posting for a software engineer that sheds some light on the goals of this new team — a real two pizza team, as the company calls it.

This goes back to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his rule that any team or meeting that can’t be fed with two pizzas is too large.

The idea is to build a set of services, and platform to bring AWS and Amazon into the world of Mixed Reality, and AWS seeks engineers that have experience in Computer Vision, 3D objects, rendering and data storage and have designed, developed and tested software solutions.

According to the post, Amazon is looking for people with gameplay and game engine skills, which is not all that surprising.

Amazon has been steadily making efforts in this field, led by the founders of 2lemetry, an IoT startup that the retail giant acquired back in 2015. This mixed reality push is clearly an example of the organization moving up the stack, expanding beyond its original focus.

That of offering cloud storage and computing to clients.

AWS has shown interest in offering its own cloud products and services lately, and this trend appears to be the heart of the company’s lawsuit against former vice president Gene Farrell, who left to join Smartsheet earlier this month.

What the ultimate end game for Amazon in mixed reality is, may take a while yet to become clear.

But Amazon going into the field of virtual, augmented or mixed reality is not a huge surprise, as many of its technology competitors are also heavily investing in the concept, which many believe is the next frontier in computing.