Gadgetory

avocadoes 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 abakan 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 services with avec on technology that light reflects off of two million micro mirrors and goes directly into your retinas your eyes in 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 right I don't have any problem seeing 3d and you don't get nauseous through seeing headaches get headaches when I'm looking around the normal world and so you know we try to recreate that light as closely as possible so we can separate where the light's generated from where the light is modulated and 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 a lighter bounced away it's a micro mechanical part that's machined using kind of semiconductor type processes so you have these millions of tiny mirrors that are hinged and they're just wobbling at an 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 avocado 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 Sena 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 - 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 8 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 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 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 with the drink card goes by you know what's going on and that's how you can feel comfortable in public that's where I wonder well people want to put on such a strange Cyclops II device and actually use it in public there's no doubt that virtual retinal display as a viable useful technology but the glyph might be a hard sell oculus wants us to have insane immersive experiences sitting at our desks in our couch avocado wants us to take them out into the world who knows how that'll go