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Intel Is Giving Up On Its Smart Glasses (theverge.com)
Intel is planning to shut down the New Devices Group (NDG), and cease development on the Vaunt smart glasses project that was revealed earlier this year. The glasses are unique in that they use retinal projection to put a display in your eyeball. "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," reports The Verge.
Intel issued a statement announcing the plans: "Intel is continuously working on new technologies and experiences. Not all of these develop into a product we choose to take to market. The Superlight [the codename for Vaunt] project is a great example where Intel developed truly differentiated, consumer augmented reality glasses. We are going to take a disciplined approach as we keep inventing and exploring new technologies, which will sometimes require tough choices when market dynamics don't support further investment." From the report: It was always unclear how precisely Intel intended to bring the Vaunt glasses to market, though sources indicated that Intel wanted to find a partner with retail expertise to partner with. Jerry Bautista, the lead for Vaunt, told me back in December that Intel was "working with key ecosystem hardware providers -- whether they're frames or lenses and things like that. Because we believe there's a whole channel to people who wear glasses that's already there." The story was first reported by The Information.
Intel issued a statement announcing the plans: "Intel is continuously working on new technologies and experiences. Not all of these develop into a product we choose to take to market. The Superlight [the codename for Vaunt] project is a great example where Intel developed truly differentiated, consumer augmented reality glasses. We are going to take a disciplined approach as we keep inventing and exploring new technologies, which will sometimes require tough choices when market dynamics don't support further investment." From the report: It was always unclear how precisely Intel intended to bring the Vaunt glasses to market, though sources indicated that Intel wanted to find a partner with retail expertise to partner with. Jerry Bautista, the lead for Vaunt, told me back in December that Intel was "working with key ecosystem hardware providers -- whether they're frames or lenses and things like that. Because we believe there's a whole channel to people who wear glasses that's already there." The story was first reported by The Information.
french toast, m'ladies (tips fedora seductively)
Who'd want to wear such an ugly pair of glasses?
(and what are you supposed to do if you don't normally wear glasses at all?)
No sig today...
The goal was 100 million of these things in a year, right?
https://slashdot.org/comments....
I wonder if it's because smart glasses are a creepy, stupid and anti-social idea that only a very small niche of people are willing to actually pay money for?
Clearly the competition from Snap was too strong.
Hahahahahaha
Someone put them on and immediately realized Ryzen is the better processor.
creep me out
It's coming, there may be a generation or 2 of technological development left in terms of optics and power consumption, but it's coming.
Can you imagine if these had been readily available during the Pokemon Go craze? My god.
Both Intel and Google keep going after the "consumer space" for this, even though they have been shown repeatedly that the general public is just not wanting this. There IS a large market that could utilize augmented reality vision, which is various manufacturing, inspection, utilities, etc; basically any place that needs to apply diagrams out of a manual to real-world situations.
I could see, for example, smart glasses working with airline mechanics, bringing up the various specifications that need to be followed, the glasses scanning whole sections of aircraft making sure nothing is out of place. A system like this could even incorporate risk management; if X number of parts are showing the same Y issue, notify a safety team to a potential larger problem and have a larger inspection done.
Paramedics could use this in conjunction with emergency rooms; imagine an ER being able to remotely guide an EMT to look at specific injuries while en-route, use that information to prep an OR before they even arrive. Nurses in the ER could also use them on injuries, allowing doctors to better queue and prep for incoming patients. Calling in a "specialist" would be far easier, as the specialist could guide a surgeon remotely; especially if the smart glasses had dual cameras that fed into another smart glass the specialist was wearing enabling stereoscopic vision.
Complex manufacturing could use them too; seeing what electronics need to connect where, what bolts need to be tightened to what specifications. They could even be paired up with specialist tools that measured voltage, torque, etc that feeds back into a larger database. Such a system could send out automatic maintenance requests if later it was found that some bolt on some aircraft needed to be a X torque but was done Y instead; or type X fuse was used but a safety report shows that Y should have been used instead; or even that X IC was installed on a flight circuit board but they all need to be replaced with type Y instead.
Intel is a great OEM but horrible at making the end product
Back in February there was a decent write up on the Verge behind some of the tech. Intel was hoping "data is the new oil", aka data-mine-the-hell-out-of-people would pay off in the long run, along with practical applications.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/...
Yes they do. Cell phones have become bigger because people want a bigger display, but have bumped into the size limit of pocketability. The obvious solution is some sort of portable display technology, which would allow the processing bits of your mobile computer (your smartphone) to remain small enough to fit in your pocket, without sacrificing screen size. The pressure to increase smartphone screen size is so great that manufacturers have been clamoring to eliminate bezels, and use dead space to display additional info.
The advantage of putting the display in glasses is that it's not really the physical screen size which matters. It's the apparent screen size - a combination of physical size and viewing distance. By putting the display right next to the eye, you can create a display with a massive apparent size even though its physical size is tiny. You avoid the drawbacks of a large physical screen size (loss of portability, easier to break, greater battery consumption).
The only solutions I've seen to this problem are a foldable/rollable display, a projection display, or a display mounted close to your eye via glasses.
Is there any speculative project that Intel has not cancelled?
I thought Steve's method was a great one, and Intel's is either built on it or came from a similar path. What was useful was the application for people with visual challenges like macular degeneration or retinitus pigmentosa, because, in a sense if you beamed the image onto the parts of the retina that still functioned, the brain could form the entire image... and I've seen some research to support this. I've got some photos from 2004 when I took a friend, who has RP, to see steve and try it out. I hope that at some point this method can be brought into use for individuals with vision challenges. Images here: http://lemmingworks.org/aruney... if anyone's interested.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2013.808365
These have been rough years for Intel. Almost all their experiments of late, like mobile CPUs, WiMax, mobile platforms, IoT, ended up in failure. Now this.
Even if this last one and the rest aren't technically failures, they're market ones. They bet on the wrong horse or couldn't make them profitable. Which is what matters.
It seems Intel is just too old, big and static to achieve anything they aren't already successful at.
Because their server and desktop products are still very successful, but those categories of products are already invented.
But don't be mistaken: their relevance is gradually eroding despite their best efforts. If they lose the quantum computing bandwagon, they're toast.
Had it been continuously, they would not have interrupted things by shutting down this project. So there, Intel.
Intel announces another "revolutionary" tech only to turn around and dump it. They did the same thing with their smartphone framework. It was a promising framework but if you wasted time learning it too bad for you. They don't keep their drivers up to date either.
If you're buying a CPU they are a safe bet but for anything else Intel are best avoided. You'll be wasting your time.
What you are saying is nonsense. You are assuming any idiot does those jobs who constantly need to read instructions held in front of them. Your EMT and health examples are hilarious - have you ever been in a hospital? - and I wouldn't get on a plane serviced by a mechanic who had to read the instructions as he went. What if he misread something? In the real world people are trained to do their jobs
Hey, instead of long term planning and investment in a market that could take off in the not too distant future lets give up and shut everything down because it's not helping quarterly profits! Not like that's ever come back to haunt a tech company ever.
Intel made smart glasses? Were these only available for commercial purposes?
So NSA pulled funding?
This is exactly the smart glasses product I'd be willing to buy. No camera, no distractions, just information in front of my eyes when I want it.
Intel loves sex on the first date, when it comes to products. They don't care to buy dinner, or a movie, and only if you have a very compelling argument and team of highly skilled negotiators will they do so.
They made USB, ARM, and had a world-changing gpgpu (think Xeon Phi) in 2009. In 2008, at the launch of the iPhone, they divested their micro-controllers and smartphone/tablet technology and called it a "win" because that was a "dead" market.
I think these fundamentals are great, and will watch the market for someone to pick up this great work and in 2-5 years make something game-changing and market-changing.
They are not just blind, which would result in random disposition and give 50/50 odds of this not being worth pursuing, they are anti-sighted. They actively reject the amazing and pursue the mundane. It is a critical failure of leadership and insight.
They probably stopped it due to display being a red only, not colour
just read about the lazer tech used, it only produces visable light in the red part of the spectrum.
This is partial due to keeping size small and keeping power requirements very low.
Once a partner realize that particlar problem the tech becomes worthless, people just won't be happy with them so no point in producing them.
The glasses scanning whole sections of aircraft sure nothing is out of place.