I hate doing the dishes. More than is probably appropriate. In the game of "you cook, I clean," I become an Iron Chef, willing to whip up 20 courses to avoid 20 minutes of scrubbing pans. Alas, sometimes there are dishes to be done. My saving grace for months has been Bluetooth headphones and an iPad Pro perched next to the sink showing It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I've seen every episode 100 times, so I don't even really watch; it's just a nice distraction.
The last few times I've been tasked with this arduous chore, however, I've had an even better setup: the Avegant Glyph. It's a headphone/headset device that puts a TV on your face. There probably are more glamorous descriptions, but that's what it is. It looks a little like Geordi La Forge's Visor, or like one of those carrot-on-a-stick apparatuses. Except instead of a carrot, it's a television. You get it, right?
The Glyph, which costs $599, is designed for media consumption. Looking at it is like watching a 65-inch 720p TV in your living room, or sitting dead-center in a movie theater. Anywhere you can plug in an HDMI cable, you can plug in the Glyph. You can connect it to your phone and watch Netflix. It can be a monitor for your computer, if you like. I spent a night with the Glyph plugged into my Xbox One, playing Rocket League for hours without turning on my television. I've seen people use it as a first-person viewer for flying a drone. Avegant imagines people will mostly use it while they travel, as a better option than their phone's tiny screen or a hotel room's crappy pay-per-view. It has no special software, and requires no new skills or adaptation. It's just a screen. On your face.
For all its wacky use cases, the Glyph is surprisingly sanely designed. It looks like a slightly oversized pair of Beats. The headphones are statement-sized over-ears, with comfy padding. They have a high-end, metallic, slightly space age-y appeal, as if Beats designed them with the bad guy from Ex Machina. The headphones sound impressively good, with wide, dynamic sound and enough low end oomph to kick you in the teeth. But enough about headphones.
You'll find all of the Glyph's unique tech on the underside of the headband. Flip is down onto the bridge of your nose and just like that you're in viewing mode. (Well, you also must flick the power slider into the "on" position.) When it first turns on, you get a (blinding!) white screen that says Glyph on it. That might take a minute or six to figure out while you adjust the placement and prescription of the lenses and attach one of four included nosepieces. There are no real guidelines for getting focus just right, but I've discovered at least one: It hurts like hell until you get it just right, at which point it feels instantly and blissfully normal. (It took me a full watery-eyed day to realize I'd accidentally spun the left lens and screwed everything up again.)
The screen is the thing about the Glyph, because it's not a screen at all. The rectangle you see is a low-powered light reflected off of two million tiny mirrors, projected directly onto your eye. It sounds creepy and maybe bad for you, but it mimics how we see sunlight bouncing off of objects in the world. Avegant calls this a "screenless display," and it's an amazing technology. It's cleaner and clearer than any VR I've ever used, with no screen door effect or fuzziness. I watched for hours without fatigue or eyestrain, and it never took even a moment to adjust to the real world afterward. Maybe instead of a TV on your face, the Glyph is like constantly looking out a window where the actors from Daredevil are re-creating season one for me to watch.