If you walk by someone using an Avegant Glyph your first impressions would lead you to believe it's part of the increasingly crowded VR industry. It's not. It's more like a personal theater for your face. The Glyph headset using tiny light projectors on millions of mirrors to project the images into your field of vision.
"It is unlike traditional (headsets), what we would think of like the Oculus and the Vive," Austin Hill, who was demoing the device, told iDigitalTimes. "These aren’t screens in front of you. These are actually images being projected onto your eye."
When iDigi caught up with Avegant, the team was demoing how the device works with drones during the Drone Rodeo at CES 2016.
"There are two little projectors in there that are projecting through the lenses," Hill said. "You get a really sharp picture with a really low latency and really nice refresh rate."
As drones were racing through the desert at high altitudes or speeds, those using the Avegant Glyph were getting a first-person view of the cameras attached to the DJI Inspire 1. Simply moving your head changed the direction of the camera.
"Accelerometers in (the Glyph) are sending the head control data over to the drone," Hill said. "So as you move your head left and right and up and down it’s translating all those movements to the camera. It’s like you’re moving your head in the sky in real time."
For Richard Kerris, chief marketing officer at Avegant, there is nothing like the Glyph.
"There really aren’t any competitors," Kerris said. "… When people see it over the eyes, they immediately think 'it’s VR.' We love VR and it’s great, but this is not VR. It is a personal media device."
The Glyph can play off any mobile device through an HDMI cord and is even has a 3D compatible mode for watching movies. Kerris said users can also remove the nose piece on the Glyph and just use them as headphones. It can also be plugged into a computer where you can answer emails and to work all while looking through the Glyph.
"We think it’s a breakthrough in technology," Kerris said. "It really incorporates the idea of personal media without shutting the rest of the world off. A lot of these things when people put them in front of their face, they lose track of everything that’s going on around them. When you have this on, you still have your vision up and down. On a plane or train, you can see if someone goes by. You don’t shut the world out around you."
The Avegant Glyph is releasing within the month. Pre-sales for the Glyph have begun for $599. Once the pre-sale ends the price will jump to $699.
