Avegant Glyph Reviewed – We Love The Resolution

At CES 2015, Jonathan from Avegant invited us to try on a prototype of a their head-mounted display, the Glyph. We have to say that Avegant’s technology has very fine resolution comparing to other HMD devices on the market.

The Glyph adopts virtual retina display that uses micro mirror array and a combination of optics to reflect images onto the retina, using the back of your eyeball as a screen. The resulting picture quality is extremely sharp and vivid, unlike anything a conventional display can produce. You really can’t see any pixels with this type of technology.

The current resolution is 1280 x 720 per eye, and roughly a 40-45 degree field of view. The current version will be 720 pixels wide, and later version will be 1080 and 4K.

The Glyph technology is different than others. A traditional screen has individual pixels, and within that pixel there’s three different colors (RGB), but these three are only representative of around 30% of the entire space of that pixel.

That’s why when you get closer you can see that screen-door effect. For the Glyph, the display is made up of a lot of micro-mirrors right next to each other, so 90% of the space is full. Because of this there’s no screen-doors effect.

Simple bright, and sleek chic design of the Glyph was all designed by their in-house designer. For those people who wears glasses, it can be very uncomfortable to wear VR headsets over their glasses. There’s no glasses required to use the Glyph. Distance between the eye as well as the diopters can be adjusted. Also, nothing goes over your head so you don’t need to worry about messing up your hair.

The demonstration did not show us that the Glyph can be a full-on immersive virtual reality headset for gaming like Oculus, so technically speaking this is not a full virtual reality headset. Avegant is trying to make the Glyph a concept of a private second-screen that integrate audio. If you can display something on a traditional screen, you should be able to view the content on the Glyph with no problem.

The Glyph is a complete multimedia device compatible with just about anything. It can be hooked up to smartphone, xbox, Pc, DVDs…etc. The model we tried at CES didn’t incorporate head tracking but we were told that the consumer model would have head tracking function integrated.

This is a a premium entertainment headset that will work with movies, games, or music, via any HDMI-equipped device or a smartphone.

Avegant also investigating how the Glyph can work with the rise of the drone culture. Apparently a lot of people are switching over to first-person view headsets. With audio and visual completely personal and private, the headset can be a perfect fit to use on airplanes, in a library or public facilities where privacy and silence is needed.