There are a lot of companies making head-mounted displays with probable release dates in 2015—it feels like Oculus has opened the floodgates and “VR” is about to really become a thing. But California-based Avegant is aiming sort of parallel to the crowd by developing a display that isn’t intended to suck you into an immersive 360-degree experience, but rather to give you the option to quickly drop a display in front of your eyes while still being able to see a bit of the world around you.

The company has ridden a successful Kickstarter campaign through to the late development stage of their Glyph headset, and is poised to ship production versions of the device to its backers in late 2015, with regular non-Kickstarter customers receiving their devices by the end of the year. Rather than use an OLED display to provide an image, the Glyph uses a pair of small DLP arrays to bounce light directly onto the wearer’s retinas. This results in a very clear, very bright pixel-free image with an extremely high effective refresh rate.

According to founder and chief strategy officer Edward Tang, Avegant started out with the intention of marketing its MEMS-based DLP display technology to the military, before the sudden explosion in the consumer market (driven, as Tang says, in no small part by Oculus) led him to retarget the technology at consumers. This has taken the form of a pair of chunky, oversized headphones, with the DLP components hidden in the connecting band. The idea is that you could wear the final production version of the Glyph (mostly) unobtrusively, and then perhaps flip the band down over your eyes when you’re on the train or something similar and want to watch a movie.









The Glyph relies on a smartphone or other A/V device with a standard HDMI cable to actually provide video to display; we demoed a heavy prototype Glyph by watching a 3D movie on a Playstation 3 directly from the Playstation Store and also by playing a few rounds of a racing game on an Android phone. In both instances, the image appeared like a square screen without any visible pixelation or any of the “screen door effect” apparent in all the other head-mounted displays I’ve tried.

The Glyph’s screen has a field of view of about 40 percent, which Tang says the company designed for on purpose so that users could still have some awareness of the world around them. You can also clearly see the world above and below the screens—while playing the racing game, for instance, I was able to look down and clearly see and interact with the controls on the smartphone I was holding.

A final production version of the Glyph doesn’t yet exist, though Tang assured us that the company was close to having final hardware in-hand. We were able to try on some non-functional prototype models, and the overall look of wearing the headphone band down over our eyes was very Star Trek. Whether you’re comfortable appearing in public like this is up to you (we have no problem with it because after all the stuff we’ve done in public for Ars, we’re pretty comfortable with ourselves).

The Glyph is available for preorder right now for $499, though the company says that the price will rise to $599 after mid-January.