Apple’s Exploratory Design Group purportedly working on multiple projects

In the latest edition of his “Power On” newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says Apple’s “covert” Exploratory Design Group” — known inside the company as “XDG” —  is working on several projects, including glucose monitoring for the Apple Watch. 

The XDG team sits within Apple’s Hardware Technologies group, led by Senior Vice President Johny Srouji, and works at a building known as Tantau 9 right outside of the Apple Park spaceship-shaped rings, according to Gurman.

From the report: The Exploratory Design Group operates as a startup within Apple and is made up of only a few hundred people, mostly engineers and academic types. That’s a far cry from the many hundreds of people in the Special Projects Group, which is focused on Apple’s self-driving car, or the more than a thousand engineers in Apple’s Technology Development Group, the team building the mixed-reality headset. 

Beyond the glucose work, XDG is working on next-generation display technology, artificial intelligence and features for AR/VR headsets that help people with eye diseases. The team originally came together under Athas to work on low-power processor technologies and next-generation batteries for smartphones, efforts that continue.

Gurman adds that he team’s members are organized by skill sets rather than individual projects. That means that one engineer could be working on several initiatives that fit their skills, rather than on one specific product. 

This info from Gurman is from the free edition of “Power On”. If you like it, consider subscribing to Bloomberg.com—you’ll receive the newsletter earlier and get exclusive access to a Q&A section.