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- What if smart glasses didn't make you look
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like a techno cyborg jerk?
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That's exactly what Intel is making.
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These smart glasses are called Vaunt
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and they're completely different from what you're expecting.
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What's amazing about these glasses
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is they look normal
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and they feel really light on my head.
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They only weigh about 50 grams.
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They're designed to do just one thing,
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show you simple, basic information in one of your eyes.
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It has this little red monochrome projector
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that shines an image on a holographic mirror thing
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which then bounces it directly into my eyeball
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so I don't have to focus on it,
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it's just sort of down there.
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But the best part is that
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if you're not looking just slightly down at the display,
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it completely disappears so it's not distracting you.
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The other thing is, you're not gonna be tapping
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and swiping and doing whatever you might do
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like you did with Google Glass.
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There's no camera here,
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it's meant to be non-intrusive,
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not annoying in social situations.
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But, you can do little subtle things
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like if a notification comes in and you wanna read it,
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you can just kinda look over and it'll slide in
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or you can dismiss it like that.
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Vaunt glasses are a prototype project
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from Intel's new devices group
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and later this year developers are gonna be able
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to start using them.
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Now, they do need to be fitted to your eyes'
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interpupillary distance so that the display can actually
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line up to your eyeball.
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So we went up to Intel's lab in San Francisco
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to try them out.
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- Take a look, tell me what you see.
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- I, whoa, I see a red,
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I see an incoming call from CEO Brian Krzanich, ah!
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- You gotta take that.
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- It fits on your face and it's basically,
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it's a heads up display,
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it's just displaying some red text here
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that I'm just seeing right below my standard line of vision.
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How on earth is this thing showing me a heads up display?
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Because I don't see it on the glasses,
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in fact, I don't even, oh, right there,
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I can finally see.
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This thing is projecting into my eye?
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- That's right.
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- How is it?
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Is it a laser, what's the story there?
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- It is a VCSEL.
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- A VCSEL?
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What is a VCSEL?
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- Vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser.
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- Is this a safe thing to have?
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- Absolutely.
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It's so low power, it's at the very bottom end
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of a class one laser.
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(upbeat music)
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- We had to integrate very, very power-efficient
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light sources, mims devices for actually painting an image.
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We use a holographic grating embedded in the lens
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to reflect the correct wavelengths back to your eye.
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The image is called retinal projection.
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So the image is actually painted
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into the back of your retina.
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If you wear prescription glasses,
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the prescription is used for looking at the world
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but not for the image we send you.
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You can have terrible vision and still see
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bright, sharp, clear image that looks like
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it comes from Infinity.
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- I know what you're thinking.
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A thing that shows notifications in my eyeball all the time
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is awful and Intel is very aware that you think that's awful
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so they're trying to be really smart
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about the stuff that it shows you.
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It's trying to only show you
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really contextually important information.
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When these things are available to buy,
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what is it gonna do?
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Like what sort of things is it gonna enable?
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Or is it just gonna be all my Twitter mentions
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rolling in my eye all the time?
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Because that sounds awful.
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- It's not.
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As you're walking around and standing where you are,
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that restaurant or that restaurant,
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which one has a better Yelp review?
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As I'm leaving my car getting instructions
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to where I was actually going,
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not where I parked.
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Simple things like that.
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You're in the kitchen, you're cooking,
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you go, "Alexa, I need that recipe for cookies,"
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and it just appears on your glasses.
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We are providing a level of behavioral A.I.
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to our system that allows us to figure out
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what to show you when.
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- Why would I feel like I need a pair of smart glasses,
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especially if I could also get like a smart watch
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that can also show me notifications all the time?
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- When I saw the first smartphone,
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I didn't go and say,
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"Wow, ride sharing, that's gonna happen."
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But the fact is ride sharing
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would have never happened without smartphones.
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We're excited about this because it enables new use cases
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for developers to come up with.
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- To try to figure out what all those use cases could be,
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later this year, Intel will open an early access program
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so developers can get units and start making stuff
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that works with the Vaunt.
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By the way, it should work with both Android and iPhones.
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And throughout this whole process,
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Intel will continue to develop its own companion app
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and A.I. and it will release more prototypes
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with different eyeglass styles.
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But then what happens?
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Why is Intel making smart eyeglasses?
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- These are incredibly difficult to make.
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The electronics in here are incredibly compact.
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The A6 that we have included are of our own design,
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the apps processor is our own as well.
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Just, the whole thing is custom
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in order to fit in this package.
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- So, you're Intel, you can do that crazy stuff.
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But just 'cause you can--
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- Doesn't mean you should.
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- So why?
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- Yes, I think B.K.'s been quoted to say
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data's the new oil.
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I think other people say somewhat similar things.
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The point is, you have to consume that data somehow.
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So not only do we wanna manage the data
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and help you compute in the data center
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with Intel servers and all that other stuff,
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we also wanna be part of presenting that data to you
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in a way that you can consume.
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So that's why we do it.
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- Right, so I just wanna be clear,
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when you say that Intel thinks of data like oil,
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this thing isn't about like
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collecting a whole bunch of biometrics from you, right?
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It's about taking all the data,
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it's all actually part of the story of
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there's a million pieces of data that might be useful to me
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and Intel wants to be in that flow of the data
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in a way that it hasn't been before.
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So here's the bet with Vaunt,
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you want smart glasses, maybe you don't, who knows,
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but you definitely don't want glasses that are big
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and ugly and techy and so you have to get over that hump
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of are you willing to put technology on your face.
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And the magic here is they've made that hump
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that you need to get over,
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do you want tech on your face,
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totally easy, like this is fine.
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This is not a thing that I'm worried about wearing.
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And once you get past that issue of,
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is this a thing that I would be willing to wear,
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then it's possible that there could be a whole bunch
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of emergent ideas that could come.
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- These will hook you because of what they provide you
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because how they can win over those constraints
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that other heavier screens can't
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or they ask you for too much.
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Arriving at the grocery store,
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both hands on the cart,
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eyes scanning the aisles for the products we need,
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and we have the shopping list somewhere, right?
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But now we have it here.
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- So those are very big dreams
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but will the tech actually work?
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These prototype glasses definitely do.
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But it's going to be up to software developers
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to make them actually useful.
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And, maybe more importantly,
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do you remember how smartphones changed
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how we all talk to each other?
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What do you think smart glasses are going to do?
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Will we accept that the people we're talking to
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might be reading Facebook on their glasses
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when we're just trying to have a dinner conversation?
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You can't really tell when somebody's paying attention
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to something on a Vaunt,
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only the person wearing the glasses can see it.
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We're a little ways from needing to worry
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about those social questions,
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but whether Intel releases smart glasses first
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or somebody else beats them to the punch,
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this technology is definitely coming.
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- So I'm talking to you right now
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and you feel like you mean so much to me
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but I'm actually playing a trivia game right now.
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- Great, that's a future I want.
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- Yeah, you can ignore people more efficiently that way.