EssilorLuxottica and Politecnico di Milano launch a partnership for the smart glasses of the future
19 Luglio 2022 - 01:30PM
EssilorLuxottica and Politecnico di Milano launch a partnership for
the smart glasses of the future
EssilorLuxottica and
Politecnico di Milano launch a partnership
for the smart
glasses of the future
- EssilorLuxottica and Politecnico di
Milano signed an agreement for
the first joint Smart Eyewear Lab, within the
city’s soon to be Parco
dei Gasometri
- The lab
will host R&D
activities for the next generation of
connected glasses, combining digital technologies with
bioengineering, physics of matter and AI skills
- The
partnership provides
initial investments of over
50 million Euro and will employ
more than 100 researchers
Milano (July
19, 2022) – EssilorLuxottica and Politecnico di
Milano have created the first ever joint research center aimed at
designing the smart glasses of the future, EssilorLuxottica Smart
Eyewear Lab.
The agreement was announced today by Vittorio
Colao, Minister for Technological Innovation and Digital
Transition; Giuseppe Sala, Mayor of Milan; Fabrizio Sala,
Lombardy’s regional Minister for Research, Innovation, University,
Export and Simplification, and Internationalization; Ferruccio
Resta, Rector of Politecnico di Milano, and Francesco Milleri,
Chairman and CEO of EssilorLuxottica. It involves an investment
worth over 50 million Euro.
The project will encompass industrial research
and experimental development of devices underlying a new generation
of wearables which are capable of autonomous network connection. It
is a pioneering and tangible project that will enable the
development of technologies and services by means of a widely used
interface such as eyewear.
The EssilorLuxottica Smart Eyewear Lab will
initially last five years and will employ when fully operational
over 100 among researchers and scientists working closely together
in a dedicated space within the Innovation District, which the
Politecnico di Milano is currently developing in the Parco dei
Gasometri, located in the Bovisa area in Milan. The University thus
aims to bridge the gap between universities and businesses,
developing a highly international research environment that fosters
synergies and transversality.
The project’s main challenge will be the
development of core hardware, software and application technologies
to enable humans to interact with the digital world. To do so, the
EssilorLuxottica Smart Eyewear Lab’s industrial research and
experimental development will be divided into five
macro-objectives: analysis and development of electronic and
photonic components, as well as algorithms to acquire, process and
offer real-world information via augmented reality to the user.
Their development will integrate the technology within various
prototype glasses, as foreseen in the last two objectives, by
developing materials, charging systems and algorithms to certify
their performance in real environments.
The EssilorLuxottica Smart Eyewear Lab in Milan
will work as part of the Group’s R&D platform, already
operating globally, with more than 30 R&D centers dedicated to
vision care, eyewear design, sustainability and digital
transformation, around 1,000 researchers and more than 11,000
patents.
EssilorLuxottica and the Politecnico di Milano
also aim to jointly create an ad hoc curriculum fostering the
development of increasingly specific skills in the wearable and
smart eyewear field and virtuously feeding the new Lab’s research
activities. The goal is to attract young talents, PhDs, researchers
and teaching staff to put their effort into this innovative
project, to train new resources who can meet the demands of the
current and future labor market.
“The agreement with EssilorLuxottica represents
a milestone in the development of the ‘Goccia di Bovisa’ area, for
several reasons,” explains the Rector of Politecnico di Milano,
Ferruccio Resta. “Certainly, the first one is that the University
now works alongside an internationally recognized example of
excellence, an Italian group that is synonymous with innovation – a
great catalyst for other entrepreneurial and research endeavors
within the innovation district taking shape in the Gasometri area.
The second reason relates to the realm in which we will operate:
the metaverse, of which we can only guess the possibilities today,
is a complex area of study and experimentation, involving
technological fields developed within the University: from
electronics, to photonics, to data science. It opens up
unprecedented perspectives that are not limited to technological
innovation or the development of new products, but reshape entire
processes, services and relationships. It is precisely on this
basis that the Joint Research Center will operate over the next
five years."
“Innovation is at the heart of
EssilorLuxottica’s business model,” Francesco Milleri, Chairman and
CEO of EssilorLuxottica, added. “The lines between physical and
virtual worlds are becoming increasingly blurred, outlining
completely unprecedented horizons and offering a unique challenge
that will propel us into the future. These new models are keys for
unlocking an enormous potential of development for the job market
and the entire economic system.”
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