Intel’s new smart glasses beam images directly onto your retina

By Warren Miller, contributing writer

Wearable technology is seemingly everywhere you look these days, from Fitbits to Apple Watches. The wave of the future isn’t merely having access to the internet in the palm of your hand, but having it attached to your body in some shape or form. That being said, there’s one kind of wearable tech that has yet to really catch on in the marketplace — the kind that you wear on your face. Despite Google’s best efforts, Google Glass never really got off the ground. But now Intel thinks that they’ve solved the smart glasses puzzle.

Introducing Vaunt, Intel’s new smart glasses that project information directly onto the wearer’s retina with a low-intensity laser. All the hardware needed to project data and images is located in the inside of the upper stems of the glasses themselves. “We had to integrate very, very power-efficient light sources, MEMS devices for actually painting an image,” Jerry Bautista, wearable device impresario of Intel’s New Devices Group, told The Verge. “We use a holographic grating embedded into 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.” Because the image is being reflected directly into the wearer’s retina, the image is always in focus, meaning that the actual glasses themselves can be prescription without distorting the image in any way.

Vaunt uses retinal projection to put a display in your eyeball. Image source: Pixabay.

The Vaunt prototypes have another distinguishing feature, one that Google Glass could never quite incorporate. To put it bluntly, they aren’t stupid-looking. People don’t seem to mind wearing relatively bulky technology on their arms or wrists, but they aren’t keen on wearing it on their faces. Vaunt smart glasses outwardly appear to be regular eyeglasses, with the tech tucked away in the inside of the stems such that it’s invisible when the glasses are being worn. “Head-worn products are hard because people assign a lot of attributes to putting something on their head,” said Itai Vonshak, head of products at NDG. “It means something about their personality.” In short, people want their smart glasses to look cool, too.

In keeping with that fundamental truth, the Vaunt team wanted their design to be something that consumers would use all day long, not just when they have a need for the technology. Intel’s internal codename for the Vaunt project was “Superlite,” an homage to the fact that Google Glass users frequently found the apparatus to wear on their heads for long periods of time. Vaunt glasses weigh in at just under 50 grams, significantly more than regular eyeglasses but considerably less than Google Glass.

The full capabilities of the Vaunt smart glasses are still being determined, particularly on the software side. Prototypes can do things like display notifications of incoming calls (the glasses are Bluetooth-compatible, so they can connect to your phone) or provide directions as you’re wandering in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Future models may incorporate a microphone so that users can communicate with an AI platform like Siri or Alexa. Most of the Vaunt’s features are still in the development phase, but it would be easy to argue that Intel has already made the difficult part of the journey, namely creating an AR interface that people may actually want to wear on their faces in public. At this point, you would think that the functionality would almost take care of itself.