This Is What the Future of Glasses Looks Like

But how will these glasses be produced? EssilorLuxottica and Politecnico di Milano will create the Smart Eyewear Lab. It will have an initial duration of five years and will employ over 100 researchers and scientists full-time, who will work closely together in a special research center within the Innovation District, which the Politecnico di Milano is developing in the Parco dei Gasometri, in the Bovisa area of Milan. The aim of the university is to reduce the distance between universities and companies with the creation of a highly international research environment that promotes synergies and transversality.

The main challenge of the project will be the definition of basic technologies in terms of hardware, software and applications to enable people to interact with the digital world. The first objectives are to study and develop electronic and photonic components and algorithms that acquire, process and display to the user all the information in the real world through augmented reality. The development of this hardware and software will allow the technology to be integrated into different prototypes of eyewear, through the development of materials, charging systems and algorithms to validate their performance in real environments.

The EssilorLuxottica Smart Eyewear Lab in Milan will operate as part of the Group’s research and development network already active and spread all over the world, with more than 30 R&D centers devoted to vision care, eyewear design, sustainability and digital transformation, approximately one thousand researchers and more than 11,000 patents.

The project is all about digital innovation, technology, change. It is about young people and the future of our group and of the whole of Italy

“Let's lay the first stone of something very important,” says Milleri. “Our regret is for not having our chairman Leonardo Del Vecchio here with us. We are talking about the things he cared about most: digital innovation, technology, change. We are here talking about young people; we are talking about the future not only of our group but of our whole country. Let’s begin to lay the foundations for a research center that will focus on basic technologies, on the components that will lead to the creation of smart glasses; they will be something much more and different, a world that we still struggle to understand and understand: the metaverse, augmented reality. We are imagining them but very few actually really know them because we lack the tools. This world will be created at the same time it is experienced with the interaction of people, which will be possible when technologies will be easy to use. This is the great challenge that can change our group and can help change the world. It’s happening in Milan–it is no coincidence that we have one of the most important sites of our group here–and with the full support of the government, which I hope will be with us for a long time to come in this project.”

Milleri also describes the EssilorLuxottica group left by Del Vecchio: “The group mission is clear, the approach is clear, this is our chairman's legacy. We will continue to grow with the market, the acquisitions are complementary. We will be an open multinational in two countries–Italy and France–with our heart in Agordo and our head in Paris and Milan. Our customers and consumers are our partners: this is the philosophy we will follow forever.”