Google has always been a company that loves to experiment and give their employees the freedom to explore far-out ventures, even if they might feel less than tangentially related to the company's core products. The business has formalized things a bit with its "Area 120" division focusing on these moonshots, but it looks like Google wants to bring the team closer to its CEO's reach. As reported by TechCrunch, Area 120 and a few other long-term bets are being restructured into a new "Google Labs" team — a rebranding right in line with Google TV, YouTube Music, Google Home, and co.

If you're old enough to remember, the old Google Labs was a publicly facing incubator that Google used to promote and demonstrate new projects. It was active from 2002 to 2011. Some of the company's most successful products took shape in this division, including Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Alerts, Lens, and many more since discontinued services (like Reader). Simultaneously, Google Labs also lived in the settings in many Google products, offering users a selection of beta features to try. Given the historic significance of the name, the new Google division has some big footsteps to fill.

This time around, Labs is not supposed to be a public brand, but it's meant to remain an internal team like Area 120 was before it. The reorganization puts Clay Bavor at the top of the division, a Google VP who previously oversaw the business' virtual and augmented reality efforts, among them high-profile projects like the futuristic window-like videoconferencing tool Starline. Given that the new Google Labs unifies Area 120 and the VR and AR research, this move makes sense and shows that Google is firmly believing in the potential of the technology — Google metaverse, anyone?

While Area 120 projects already had to be signed off by Google chief Sundar Pichai, the reorganization has Bavor report directly to the CEO, making clear just how high-profile the company thinks Google Labs will be and where it will likely focus a lot of its resources. As more and more businesses are moving towards their own take on the "metaverse," a buzz term describing a range of new technologies like VR, AR, and super-fast internet enabling people to live in a virtual universe, it looks like Google doesn't want to be left out.

Area 120 has previously launched a few neat tools such as a document scanner that automatically organizes your receipts and personal data in Google Drive and the newsletter and website publishing tool Museletter, so we can likely still expect intriguing short-term projects being churned out by Google Labs.

So far, Google hasn't made a public announcement regarding the reorganization, but following TechCrunch's coverage based on an internal memo, the company has confirmed that the story is correct.