- What if smart glasses didn't make you look
like a techno cyborg jerk?
That's exactly what Intel is making.
These smart glasses are called Vaunt
and they're completely different from what you're expecting.
What's amazing about these glasses
is they look normal
and they feel really light on my head.
They only weigh about 50 grams.
They're designed to do just one thing,
show you simple, basic information in one of your eyes.
It has this little red monochrome projector
that shines an image on a holographic mirror thing
which then bounces it directly into my eyeball
so I don't have to focus on it,
it's just sort of down there.
But the best part is that
if you're not looking just slightly down at the display,
it completely disappears so it's not distracting you.
The other thing is, you're not gonna be tapping
and swiping and doing whatever you might do
like you did with Google Glass.
There's no camera here,
it's meant to be non-intrusive,
not annoying in social situations.
But, you can do little subtle things
like if a notification comes in and you wanna read it,
you can just kinda look over and it'll slide in
or you can dismiss it like that.
Vaunt glasses are a prototype project
from Intel's new devices group
and later this year developers are gonna be able
to start using them.
Now, they do need to be fitted to your eyes'
interpupillary distance so that the display can actually
line up to your eyeball.
So we went up to Intel's lab in San Francisco
to try them out.
- Take a look, tell me what you see.
- I, whoa, I see a red,
I see an incoming call from CEO Brian Krzanich, ah!
- You gotta take that.
- It fits on your face and it's basically,
it's a heads up display,
it's just displaying some red text here
that I'm just seeing right below my standard line of vision.
How on earth is this thing showing me a heads up display?
Because I don't see it on the glasses,
in fact, I don't even, oh, right there,
I can finally see.
This thing is projecting into my eye?
- That's right.
- How is it?
Is it a laser, what's the story there?
- It is a VCSEL.
- A VCSEL?
What is a VCSEL?
- Vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser.
- Is this a safe thing to have?
- Absolutely.
It's so low power, it's at the very bottom end
of a class one laser.
(upbeat music)
- We had to integrate very, very power-efficient
light sources, mims devices for actually painting an image.
We use a holographic grating embedded in the lens
to reflect the correct wavelengths back to your eye.
The image is called retinal projection.
So the image is actually painted
into the back of your retina.
If you wear prescription glasses,
the prescription is used for looking at the world
but not for the image we send you.
You can have terrible vision and still see
bright, sharp, clear image that looks like
it comes from Infinity.
- I know what you're thinking.
A thing that shows notifications in my eyeball all the time
is awful and Intel is very aware that you think that's awful
so they're trying to be really smart
about the stuff that it shows you.
It's trying to only show you
really contextually important information.
When these things are available to buy,
what is it gonna do?
Like what sort of things is it gonna enable?
Or is it just gonna be all my Twitter mentions
rolling in my eye all the time?
Because that sounds awful.
- It's not.
As you're walking around and standing where you are,
that restaurant or that restaurant,
which one has a better Yelp review?
As I'm leaving my car getting instructions
to where I was actually going,
not where I parked.
Simple things like that.
You're in the kitchen, you're cooking,
you go, "Alexa, I need that recipe for cookies,"
and it just appears on your glasses.
We are providing a level of behavioral A.I.
to our system that allows us to figure out
what to show you when.
- Why would I feel like I need a pair of smart glasses,
especially if I could also get like a smart watch
that can also show me notifications all the time?
- When I saw the first smartphone,
I didn't go and say,
"Wow, ride sharing, that's gonna happen."
But the fact is ride sharing
would have never happened without smartphones.
We're excited about this because it enables new use cases
for developers to come up with.
- To try to figure out what all those use cases could be,
later this year, Intel will open an early access program
so developers can get units and start making stuff
that works with the Vaunt.
By the way, it should work with both Android and iPhones.
And throughout this whole process,
Intel will continue to develop its own companion app
and A.I. and it will release more prototypes
with different eyeglass styles.
But then what happens?
Why is Intel making smart eyeglasses?
- These are incredibly difficult to make.
The electronics in here are incredibly compact.
The A6 that we have included are of our own design,
the apps processor is our own as well.
Just, the whole thing is custom
in order to fit in this package.
- So, you're Intel, you can do that crazy stuff.
But just 'cause you can--
- Doesn't mean you should.
- So why?
- Yes, I think B.K.'s been quoted to say
data's the new oil.
I think other people say somewhat similar things.
The point is, you have to consume that data somehow.
So not only do we wanna manage the data
and help you compute in the data center
with Intel servers and all that other stuff,
we also wanna be part of presenting that data to you
in a way that you can consume.
So that's why we do it.
- Right, so I just wanna be clear,
when you say that Intel thinks of data like oil,
this thing isn't about like
collecting a whole bunch of biometrics from you, right?
It's about taking all the data,
it's all actually part of the story of
there's a million pieces of data that might be useful to me
and Intel wants to be in that flow of the data
in a way that it hasn't been before.
So here's the bet with Vaunt,
you want smart glasses, maybe you don't, who knows,
but you definitely don't want glasses that are big
and ugly and techy and so you have to get over that hump
of are you willing to put technology on your face.
And the magic here is they've made that hump
that you need to get over,
do you want tech on your face,
totally easy, like this is fine.
This is not a thing that I'm worried about wearing.
And once you get past that issue of,
is this a thing that I would be willing to wear,
then it's possible that there could be a whole bunch
of emergent ideas that could come.
- These will hook you because of what they provide you
because how they can win over those constraints
that other heavier screens can't
or they ask you for too much.
Arriving at the grocery store,
both hands on the cart,
eyes scanning the aisles for the products we need,
and we have the shopping list somewhere, right?
But now we have it here.
- So those are very big dreams
but will the tech actually work?
These prototype glasses definitely do.
But it's going to be up to software developers
to make them actually useful.
And, maybe more importantly,
do you remember how smartphones changed
how we all talk to each other?
What do you think smart glasses are going to do?
Will we accept that the people we're talking to
might be reading Facebook on their glasses
when we're just trying to have a dinner conversation?
You can't really tell when somebody's paying attention
to something on a Vaunt,
only the person wearing the glasses can see it.
We're a little ways from needing to worry
about those social questions,
but whether Intel releases smart glasses first
or somebody else beats them to the punch,
this technology is definitely coming.
- So I'm talking to you right now
and you feel like you mean so much to me
but I'm actually playing a trivia game right now.
- Great, that's a future I want.
- Yeah, you can ignore people more efficiently that way.