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 euros.

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 one hundred researchers working 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 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.