Intel Vaunt

~ the obituary ~

Intel killed this one with a compliment. The statement it gave the press in April 2018 reads: "Not all of these develop into a product we choose to take to market. The Superlight project is a great example where Intel developed truly differentiated, consumer augmented reality glasses." Superlight was the internal name. The public name was Vaunt, and at the moment Intel wrote that sentence the product worked and weighed fifty grams, with an early access program standing open for people to sign up to.

The reveal was ten weeks earlier, on 5 February 2018, handed to The Verge as an exclusive with filmed access to the team. What they were shown was a pair of glasses. Not glasses with a thing on them, which is what every other attempt at this had been. The frames held a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser in the right rim, low enough powered to be class one and therefore to need no certification, firing at a holographic reflector in the lens that painted a monochrome red image of roughly 400 by 150 pixels directly onto the wearer's retina.

Everything about the design was a correction of Google Glass. There was no camera, so there was nothing to be thrown out of a bar for. There was no speaker and no visible glow, so nobody facing you could tell the display was on or even that it existed. The thing was built to be boring on purpose, by a company that had watched the privacy backlash of 2013 and drawn the correct conclusion from it.

On 18 April 2018, a Wednesday, Intel told the roughly two hundred people of its New Devices Group that the group was being closed. The news reached the press the next day. Vaunt was not killed because it did not work. It was killed because Intel had spent several hundred million dollars across five years looking for a wearables business and had decided, with a product finally in hand, that it did not want to find out what the second year would cost.

~ the case file ~

~ the subtractions ~

The engineering restraint is the part worth keeping. Retinal projection was not new as an idea and had been chased since the 1990s, generally by people who ended up with something the size of a motorcycle helmet. Getting it into a frame you could wear to lunch meant giving up nearly everything, starting with color and ending with any notion of a rich interface. What was left was a small red readout that sat at the edge of vision and showed you a notification or a direction. It disappeared completely when you looked straight ahead.

I work on vision systems for small hardware, where the whole job is deciding what to throw away to fit a power budget. Looking at the Vaunt teardown coverage from that angle, what stands out is how much the team was willing to lose. A class-one laser that needs no regulatory certification is a decision that costs you brightness and buys you the ability to ship. Fifty grams is a decision that costs you battery. The entire product is a stack of subtractions, and what came through them was a pair of frames at fifty grams.

~ what else died that day ~

The New Devices Group was formed in 2013 and Vaunt was its last act, so the shutdown closed a longer story than a pair of glasses. Intel had bought Basis in 2014 and shipped the Basis Peak under its own name, then recalled it in 2016 after the watches overheated. It bought Recon Instruments of Vancouver in 2015 and discontinued the Recon Jet in June 2017. It built the Edison module and put it on stage at a consumer electronics show with a great deal of confidence. Those products have four graves on this site between them, and Vaunt makes five.

Intel's wearables decade ended with a division closing and two hundred people looking for work, and the official reason given was market dynamics. Meanwhile the idea was fine. Seven years on, the head-worn thing people actually buy is a pair of ordinary-looking frames with no display in them whatsoever. That is Vaunt's own conclusion about what the public would put up with, arrived at by a company that stayed in the room long enough to act on it.

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