 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 Vant, 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 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 at 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 non-intrusive, non-annoying in social situations. But you can do little subtle things, like if a notification comes in and you want to read it, you can just kind of look over and it'll slide in, or you can dismiss it like that. Vant 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 eye's 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. Tell me what you see. I, uh, whoa, I see a red, I see an incoming call from CEO Brian Krizanich. You gotta take that. It fits in your face and it's basically, 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 eye. That's right. How is it, is it a laser? What's the story there? It is a VCSEL. A VCSEL? What is a VCSEL? Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser. Is this a 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 wear 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 my eyeball 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 going to do? What sort of things is it going to enable? Is it just going to be all my Twitter mentions rolling in my eye all the time? Because that sounds awful. It's not. As you're walking around and standing where you are, that restaurant or that restaurant, which one has a better Yelp review? As I'm leaving my car, getting instructions to where I was actually going, not where I parked. Simple things that are, you're in the kitchen, you're cooking, you 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 glasses, especially when I could also get a smart watch that can also show me notifications all the time? When I saw the first smartphone, I didn't go and say, wow, ride sharing, that's going to happen. But the fact is ride sharing 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 AI, 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. The electronics in here are incredibly compact. The ASICs that we have included are of our own design. The apps processor is our own as well. Just the whole thing is custom 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 has 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 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 thing isn't about collecting a bunch of biometrics from it. No. It's about taking all the data. Intel wants 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 of the data in a way that it hasn't been before. So here's the bet with Vant. You want smart glasses, maybe you don't, who knows, but you definitely don't want glasses that are big and ugly and techy. 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 that could come. These will hook you because of what they provide you, because how they can win over those constraints that other heavier screens can't, or they ask you for too much. Arriving at the grocery store, both hands on the cart, 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 developers 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 Facebook 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 to me, but I'm actually playing a trivia game right now. Great. That's the feature I want. Yeah. Yeah. You can ignore people more efficiently that way.