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.

Comments

Because they are stupid?

[pablo_max]

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?

Missed opportunity

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

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.