 Avagant is a company at the center of a lot of really disparate things. We want bigger and more immersive ways to watch movies and play games, but we have these incredibly powerful computers in our pockets. Meanwhile, we're all becoming more comfortable wearing new gadgets, like Google Glass or the Oculus Rift. Avagant thinks there's a place in the middle of all this, as long as the right technology is in play, and it's building a device called the Glyph to prove it. It's essentially a $499 screen you strap to your face, except it's not really a screen at all. It's called a virtual retinal display, and instead of just showing you an image to look at, it's projecting that image directly on your eye. It's much more like the way we all see, everything is just light reflecting off of other surfaces. With Avagant's technology, that light reflects off of two million micro-mirrors and goes directly into your retinas. Your eyes and your brain actually create the image. The technology's actually been around for decades, mostly used in medical and military cases. But even for regular people, it has some really obvious benefits. When we look around the room, my eyes don't get tired. I don't have any problems seeing 3D, and I don't get nauseous or seeing headaches. I get headaches when I'm looking around the normal world. We try to recreate that light as closely as possible. We can separate where the light is generated from where the light is modulated. How we modulate light means we have these mirrors that bend and twist, and all we do is pick and choose what colors of light are bounced in and what colors of light are bounced away. It's a micro-mechanical part that's machine-using, kind of semiconductor-type processes. We have these millions of tiny mirrors that are hinged, and they're just wobbling at insane speed. The Glyph looks like a set of headphones. It actually is a set of headphones, until you flip the band down over your face. That's when you'll start seeing movies, games, and whatever else you can think of. I haven't used the Glyph itself, but I've tried two different prototypes, and all it took was plugging in a phone or a PlayStation 3 to get it working. It's designed to be totally plug-and-play. Life of Pi played in perfect 3D without being adapted at all, and in Call of Duty Ghosts, my head was mapped to the right joystick. When I turned, my character did too. But Avagad needs to get developers to do even more. The company imagines a 360-degree camera at a football game, so you can see everything as if you're standing at the 50-yard line. Games could be even more tuned to what your eyes and your head are doing, and movies could be both surround sound and surround picture. Right now, the Glyph is really just a better screen for watching Netflix, but with developer help, it could be something much more. The prototypes we've seen were pretty rough, and there will always be some setup. You have to tune the focus to suit your eyes, and the two sides have to be perfectly aligned or you get an awkward double image. But when it works, it's great. It takes no time at all to adjust to, and my eyes never got tired. The Glyph has about 45 degrees of visibility, which is roughly like looking at an 80-inch TV from eight feet away. It doesn't completely fill your view like the Oculus Rift, and actually allows you to see outside of it. So one of the really important things that we focus on is to actually give people quite a large peripheral vision in this direction, so that you can still see your hands. You get a text message, you pull out your phone and still see your phone. If you want to use your computer, you can still look at your keyboard, or if the guy next to you needs to get up or the drink cart goes by, you know what's going on. And that's how you can feel comfortable in public. That's where I wonder, will people want to put on such a strange, cyclops-y device and actually use it in public? There's no doubt that virtual retinal display is a viable, useful technology, but the Glyph might be a hard sell. Oculus wants us to have insane, immersive experiences sitting at our desks and on our couch. Avagant wants us to take them out into the world. Who knows how that'll go.