CES debut for Avegant Glyph "Virtual Retinal Display" headsets

What better way to take a trip in a personal virtual reality bubble, or sit down to a private movie screening on a seemingly enormous screen, than donning a head-mounted display? Unless you happen to be dressed as Geordi La Forge at a Star Trek convention though, wearing such technology does kind of label you a bit of a geek. The Glyph headsets are a little different. In non-video mode, the device just looks like some rather bulky headphones. The headband, however, can be pulled down over the eyes for an immersive escape. Rather than looking at an LCD or OLED display (or in some cases using an actual smartphone screen) through lenses,

Glyph users have the video and game images projected directly on their retinas courtesy of a combination of special optics and millions of tiny mirrors. The first pre-production prototypes are currently being assembled in readiness for CES in a few weeks, ahead of a launch on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.Now in the final stages of pre-production prototype development, the Glyph is based on patented technology developed by Avegant CTO Dr Allan Evans. Other key players in the company are Ed Tang (CEO), Yobie Benjamin (COO and CSO), Grant Martin (Head of Marketing and Product Strategy), and Neil Welch (VP of Engineering). Image delivery is undertaken using a combination of custom optics and micro-mirrors (similar to DLP, and developed in partnership with TI) to reflect low-powered LED light directly onto a user's retinas, which is reported to result in a more vivid, lifelike image, with a level of clarity not available on other head-mounted displays.

"We stare at things like computer screens all day, and as you know, if you look into that screen for half an hour, you get really tired," Tang told CBS Detroit last week. "But if you look at the real world, you don’t. He [Evans] set about trying to solve that, trying to recreate that really vivid, natural image. He created a virtual retinal display that replicates how we see things in the natural world, by reflected light. When you stare into something that’s glowing, like an emissive LCD panel, you get eye strain. We reflect the light – we take a low-power, low-light LED and shine it at a couple million microscopic mirrors. These mirrors bend and tilt, and we use the mirrors to control what light to reflect to your eye