The Google Glass Team Is Just 50 People

Owen Thomas, Business InsiderGoogle Glass team member Isabelle Olsson shows off the headset at Google I/O.Google Glass, the search giant's Internet-connected headset, is getting a lot of buzz outside the company.

It's also been getting a lot of buzz inside the company, with engineers and product people vying to get a spot on the team.

Google has even been dangling the prospect of working on Google Glass and other projects within the Google X skunkworks to restive engineers who are thinking of bolting the company.

But the Google Glass team is tiny—just 50 people, according to a source familiar with Google's recruiting efforts for Glass.

That's less than 0.1 percent of the company, which has about 55,000 employees, including Motorola.

The team has grown since Glass was unveiled at Google I/O last summer. At the time, its size was described as a "handful" of industrial designers and software engineers, and only a half-dozen or so employees even got to wear test units.

Now, LinkedIn shows 20 Google employees who list "Project Glass" on their profiles and 48 who mention "Google Glass." ("Project Glass" was the name for the earlier, experimental effort that led to the development of the Google Glass device.)

We asked Google about our source's claim.

"We don't generally comment on team sizes," Google spokesperson Jay Nancarrow told us.

Bloomberg recently reported that Apple's similar effort to develop wearable computers, the so-called "iWatch" project, has 100 people working on it.