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Keep Your Eyes On This: The Avegant Glyph

The eyes have it


Just to get this out of the way: the Glyph headset is currently not a VR headset. It's a head-mounted display aimed at allowing people to watch movies as if on a large display, though they are looking at the potential for head-tracking with games. But it's worth knowing about: it's portable headset completely encased in a set of earphones, so with the band twisted up you can use it to listen to music. Twisted down, however, and it becomes something more akin to a theatre, blasting an image directly into you eyes. That's the kicker: instead of spreading the image over a blurry screen, the Glyph fires it right into your retinas via two million micro-mirrors. There is no screen. The Kickstarter has already reached its target, so you can read about it without any obligation to make it happen.

I'll admit that I'm mostly intrigued for the potential it has in the head-tracking space: by all accounts, the way it delivers images seems to solve a lot of the problems plaguing the Rift, eliminating resolution troubles and screen-door effects. Though there's no talk of how speedily it updates, and the current FOV (45 degrees) is way off the Rift's required wide-angle. I basically want these guys to meet up in a lift and to start admiring each other, like a sexy movie.

Smart people I trust over at Tested had some time with it. It's worth watching their take on watching a movie on the thing. The idea of having a virtual 80 inch screen 8 feet away seems like it could make a plane journey disappear in a snap.

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