Gadgetory

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 in my head they've 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 to the display it completely disappears so it's not distracting you the other thing is you're not going to 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 not intrusive not annoying in social situations but you can do little subtle things like if a notification comes anyone read it you can just kind of look over and it'll slide in or you can dismiss it like that Vaughn glasses are a prototype project from Intel's new devices group and later this year developers are going to 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 into Intel's lab in San Francisco to try them out take a look some what you see I whoa I I see it red I see incoming call from CEO Brian krzanich it fits interfaces it's basically it's 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 eyes that's right what how is it visible is it a laser what's the story it is a pixel a victim yeah what is it what is a vixen vertical cavity surface emitting laser is this safe thing to have absolutely it's so low powered it's at the very bottom end of a class-one laser we had to integrate very very power efficient light sources MEMS 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 were 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 Maya 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 going to enable they're just gonna be you know all my Twitter mentions rolling and my eye all the time because that sounds awful it's not okay as you're walking around understanding where you are that restaurant or at that restaurant which one has a better yelp review as I'm leaving my car getting instructions to where it was actually going not where I parked simple things that are you're in the kitchen and you're cooking and go Alexa I need that recipe for cookies and it just appears on your glasses we are providing a level of behavioral AI 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 classes especially but I could also get like a SmartWatch that can also show me notifications all the time what I saw the first smartphone mmm-hmm I didn't go and say wow right Chewie that's gonna happen but the fact is right Turing 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 okay the electronics in here are incredibly compact the Asics that we have included or of our own design the apse processor is our own as well just the whole thing is custom right in order to fit in this package okay so your Intel you can do that crazy stuff but just because you can doesn't mean you should so why yes I think BK's been quoted to say data is 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 want to manage the data and help you compute in the data center with Intel servers and all that other stuff we also we want to want to be part of presenting that data to you in a way that you can consume so that's what we do right so I just want to be clear when you say that Intel thinks of data like oil this this thing isn't about like collecting all that your biometrics form no right it's about taking all the data it's a lot to be 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 ok 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 techie 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 I could come these will help you because of what they provide you because how they can win over those constraints that other have your screens can't or they ask you for too much arriving at the grocery store both hands on the car 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 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 face book on their glasses when we're just trying to have a dinner conversation you can't really tell when somebody is 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 I'm actually playing a trivia game right now great that's the future I want yeah yeah yeah you can ignore people more efficiently that way