The most important parts of Intel’s new Vaunt smart glasses are the pieces that were left out.
There is no camera to creep people
out, no button to push, no gesture area to swipe, no glowing LCD screen,
no weird arm floating in front of the lens, no speaker, and no
microphone (for now).
From the outside, the Vaunt glasses
look just like eyeglasses. When you’re wearing them, you see a stream of
information on what looks like a screen — but it’s actually being
projected onto your retina.
The prototypes I wore in December also felt
virtually indistinguishable from regular glasses. They come in several
styles, work with prescriptions, and can be worn comfortably all day.
Apart from a tiny red glimmer that’s occasionally visible on the right
lens, people around you might not even know you’re wearing smart glasses.
Like Google Glass did five years ago, Vaunt will launch
an “early access program” for developers later this year. But Intel’s
goals are different than Google’s. Instead of trying to convince us we could change our lives for a head-worn display, Intel is trying to change the head-worn display to fit our lives.
Google Glass, and the Glassholes who came with it, gave
head-worn displays a bad reputation. HoloLens is aiming for a full,
high-end AR experience that literally puts a Windows PC on your head.
Magic Leap puts an entire computer on your hip, plus its headset is a
set of goggles that look like they belong in a Vin Diesel movie.
We live in a world where our watches have LTE and our
phones can turn our faces into bouncing cartoon characters in real time.
You’d expect a successful pair of smart glasses to provide similar
wonders. Every gadget these days has more, more, more.
With Vaunt, Intel is betting on less.
Putting the “wear” in wearable
Take the
stickers and part numbers off the Vaunt prototypes I tried this past
December, and they would just look like slightly chunky, plastic-framed
glasses. With a little more polish, I could see myself wearing them all
the time, even if they didn’t have a display. Though I only saw two
versions in Intel’s New Devices Group (NDG) San Francisco offices, Intel
envisions having many different styles available when the product
formally launches.
”When
we look at what types of new devices are out there, [we are] really
excited about head-worn [products],” says Itai Vonshak, head of products
for NDG. “Head-worn products are hard because people assign a lot of
attributes to putting something on their head. It means something about
their personality.” That’s Vonshak’s politic way of saying other smart
glasses look terrible, so his goal was to create something that has, as
he puts it over and over again, “zero social cost.”
”We wanted to make sure somebody puts this on and gets
value without any of the negative impact of technology on their head,”
he says. “Everything from the ground up is designed to make the
technology disappear.”
One of the Vaunt team’s primary design goals was to
create a pair of smart glasses you could wear all day. Vaunt’s codename
inside Intel was “Superlite” for a reason: they needed to weigh in under
50 grams. That’s still more than most eyeglasses by a noticeable
margin, but Google Glass added an extra 33 grams on top of whatever pair
you were wearing. Anything more and they’d be uncomfortable. The
electronics and batteries had to be placed so they didn’t put too much
weight on either your nose or your ears. They had to not just look like normal glasses, they had to feel like them.
That’s why all of the electronics in Vaunt sit inside two
little modules built into the stems of the eyeglasses. More
importantly, though, the electronics are located entirely up near the
face of the frames so that the rest of the stems, and even the frame
itself, can flex a little, just like any other regular pair of glasses.
Other smart glasses have batteries that are integrated into the entire
stem, “so those become very rigid and do not deform to adjust to your
head size,” says Mark Eastwood, NDG’s industrial design director. “It’s
very important when you look at eyewear that it deforms along its entire
length to fit your head.”
