Meta partner EssilorLuxottica sets course for its own AR glasses

The European eyewear group and world's largest eyewear manufacturer, EssilorLuxottica, has announced a long-term partnership with the US technology group Applied Materials. The agreement stipulates that the partners will jointly develop optical systems for smart glasses and AR glasses.

EssilorLuxottica is to contribute its experience with eyeglass lenses, frames, and smart glasses, while Applied Materials will contribute its expertise in material technology and waveguide technologies, according to the announcement.

Waveguides are considered a key component of transparent eyeglass displays: they direct light from an image source into the eyeglass lens and thus steer it into the eye so that an image appears in the field of vision. Joint research will take place in a specially established joint laboratory on Applied Materials' Silicon Valley campus. In addition to waveguides, new materials and adaptive lenses will also be researched there.

EssilorLuxottica builds its own tech expertise

Applied Materials is one of the world's largest suppliers to the semiconductor industry and achieved sales of around 28 billion US dollars in the past fiscal year. The group specializes in high-precision manufacturing processes, such as those required for modern chips and displays.

This expertise can be transferred to the production of waveguides; they also require extremely fine structures that are applied to optical substrates with high precision. Applied Materials is already represented with such waveguides in products such as the RayNeo X3 Pro.

EssilorLuxottica's partnership with Applied Materials can be classified as an investment in technological independence. To date, a large proportion of the technology in the smart glasses developed jointly with Meta comes from Meta and Meta's manufacturing partners. For example, the waveguides of the Meta Ray-Ban Display are manufactured by the German specialty glass manufacturer Schott in Malaysia.

The development of its own partnerships and waveguide expertise could one day enable EssilorLuxottica to develop its own smart glasses with displays and full-fledged AR glasses independently of Meta. And ensure that the Italian-French eyewear group not only remains Meta's eyewear partner in the long term, but also becomes a co-creator of central smart glasses technologies.

(wpl)