Intel made a lot of moves in 2014 to open a door into the augmented and virtual reality world. The most significant one seems to be the investment of $24.8 million in Vuzix. Now the company has announced another transaction that closed in 2014 with the acquisition of Composyt Light Labs, a Swiss based developer of smartglasses.
The announcement about the acquisition cannot be found on the Intel website, but the Composyt Light Lab website states that it has been acquired by Intel, with no other webpages available and a short thank you to its partners and supporters in the development of the company.
Composyt Light Labs worked together with Lemoptix, a developer of MEMS based microdisplays, on incorporating these displays into a super small form factor augmented reality headset. The goal was to make the projector so small that it would fit into the frame of normal glasses. As of now, Lemoptix is not part of the acquisition.
Display Daily Comment
This acquisition confirms Intel’s interest in the wearable electronics space including smartglasses. It is unclear if Google’s decision to revamp its Google Glass efforts and the latest announcement of Microsoft’s HoloLens device influenced that decision or not. For now it seems that we will have a strong group of companies pursuing this market. – Norbert Hildebrand
