What if smart glasses didn’t make
you look like a techno cyborg jerk? That’s what Intel is making, or as Ther Verge puts
it: smart glasses that won't make you look like a Glasshole. Not designed to
conjure 3D projections before your very eyes, nor capable of the rich
mixed-reality experience targeted by Microsoft Hololens and Magic Leap, the
form and function of these glasses are intended for every day and unobtrusive
use – an important lesson to get right if the failure of Google Glass is
anything to judge by.
There is a clue in the internal
name of the project, ‘SuperLite’, referring to the goal for the glasses to
weigh less than 50 grams.
Unveiled as Vaunt, Intel shared
details on the prototype in an exclusive interview with The Verge. Rather than
integrate a bulky camera, the frame contains a red low-powered laser (VCSEL or
vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser) that projects text onto a reflecting
area in the glasses' lens. That image, of 400 x 150 pixels, is then beamed into
the back of your eyeball, directly onto the retina so you can read it.
All this is claimed to happen at
an intensity so low that you should not risk damaging your eye. The iPhone X
contains the same laser for facial recognition.
Because the image sits directly
on your eye, near- or far-sighted users can see the text as clearly as someone
with 20-20 vision. Of course, these users will still need prescription lenses
in their Vaunts to see the outside world clearly.
The plastic frame also contains a
battery intended to give 18 hours of life.
Intel says it will launch a
developer’s program this year to open up the tech to other services and devices
and will eventually integrate voice assistants via a small mic. Vaunt already
works over Bluetooth with an Android or Apple smartphone.
Intel says it aims to offer
ambient, contextual information when you need it, but the use-cases it
outlines don’t exactly sound like things that will persuade many to swap
their phone for one; getting directions, checking a recipe, viewing restaurant
ratings, an occasional email notification. These are the sorts of basic
information offloaded to smartwatches - and who has one of those?
Yet, the notifications appear
about 15 degrees below the user’s “relaxed line of sight,” which means the user
can easily ignore the display. The second the user looks up, the display
disappears. What’s more, there’s no obvious sign to anyone else that the user
is checking their dashboard since there’s no need for hand gestures. Instead,
you interact with the information with subtle head movements, tracked by
Vaunt’s AI.
The Verge speculates that
the device may rely on streaming content from apps based in the cloud, or from
your smartphone via Bluetooth, to run its software. This could keep hardware
requirements, as well as prices, low.
Intel
sells off AR unit
The development also needs to be
seen in the wider context of Intel’s business. Just before Vaunt was given its
first outing, Bloomberg reported the company’s plan to spin off its augmented
reality division into a separate company and sell off a majority of its
shareholding.
The main IP in the AR division is
Vaunt, itself derived from technology and personnel acquired by Intel in 2015
from AR outfit Recon Instruments.
This could be, as Bloomberg
suggests, designed to raise cash and bring in experts who can turn the
prototype into a commercial retail device. It may also be because Intel’s core
business is making processors and it doesn’t want to shoulder the R&D cost
of a peripheral business.
After all, last autumn, Intel
shuttered development of mixed-reality headset platform Project Alloy and
discontinued the RealSense SDK for Windows, although it continues to market the
RealSense cameras which capture depth data from images.
Google Glass, meanwhile, hasn’t
gone away. Google has refocused its efforts on the business world with the
Glass Enterprise Edition. GE, Volkswagen, Boeing and DHL are among around 50
organisations testing it.
Assuming Intel can find the right
investors/partners, then Vaunt is a step in the right direction for wearable
VR, short of inserting a chip into one’s optical cortex, of course. There’s
probably a division working on that too. Intel Inside.
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