Avegant, the start-up developing the headset Glyph that beams video straight onto a viewer’s inner eye, said its first units will be available to backers in January.
The company is prepping a factory to build the Glyphs, the first of which should come off the line in the first week of January and arrive for its Kickstarter backers later in the month, according to a post by CEO Joerg Tewes on the company’s Kickstarter page Tuesday.
The Glyph, which looks like it combines of a pair of high-end Beats headphones with the visor worn by Star Trek character Geordi La Forge, is one of several consumer entertainment devices arriving this year and next that are poised to morph video entertainment. Alongside virtual reality headsets like Facebook’s Oculus Rift, new immersive formats are introducing fundamentally new ways to experience entertainment for the first time in decades.
Avegant has raised more than $1.5 million on crowdfunding site Kickstarter for the Glyph.
The Glyph uses an array of millions of miniature mirrors to project images directly onto the retina of its viewer, creating hyper-sharp images. It displays almost any kind of digital content, from a Netflix stream to already purchased movie, using same kind of HDMI cable that consumers connect their TVs to DVD players, while also acting as a pair of straightforward high-quality headphones when worn upright.