Google Glass, with all the skydiving ridiculousness of its early days, was a joke before it could even get off the ground. Unsubtle, dumb-looking, and prohibitively expensive from the jump, they were all but doomed to fail. But the idea of a heads-up display for your face does have some appeal, and Intel's new "Vaunt" project might be its expression yet.

Intel shared the details on its new project in an exclusive interview with The Verge, and demonstrated the glasses' form and function. The prototype Vaunt glasses are a little chunky at parts, but not immediately sci-fi, and that's in part because they lack any bulky, invasive camera. Instead, they simply contain a small red laser that projects text onto a reflecting area in the glasses' lens. From there, it bounces back into your eye for you to read. All this happens at an intensity so low that it should run no risk of damaging your eye, or even being particularly noticeable to anyone looking at you.

Maybe the most crucial detail, however, is that the geometry of this reflection setup means that the notifications essentially aren't there if you're not looking at them. That, combined with the absence of any sort of vibration or chiming noise, would theoretically make these alerts as unobtrusive as they could possibly be. Even better, you interact with them via subtle tilts of the head instead of any sort of obvious, embarrassing hand motions that require you to touch the frames. It's a much simpler device with a much more focused suite of applications than both its predecessor Google Glass but also its contemporary competitors like Magic Leap.

For now, these glasses are in an early prototype stage, with no word on a price or release date. Another crucial factor will be what other services and devices these glasses can work with, though as Intel told The Verge, Vault is designed to be open.

Vaunt is an obvious a gigantic improvement over Google Glass not only in terms of appearance, but all the privacy complicating features they leave out. Still, with all that stripped away, they pose an interesting question: Will your life be materially improved by more, quicker access to more information? The general cratering of the smartwatch craze suggests that the answer may well be no, and that's to say nothing of the general, anecdotal fatigue we all tend to feel from constantly buzzing phones, chiming alert noises, constant social media notifications, and the generally inescapable din of the modern world.

That said, a laser display for your eyes still does sound pretty cool.

Source: The Verge

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