The startup is Avegant, a company you might already know. A few years ago, it created the Glyph, a personal entertainment center that looks (and acts) like a pair of headphones. At the same time as it was making Glyph, however, the swirl and excitement around VR and AR was in the air, and it was hard to ignore. "Everything was moving forward to more wearable computing devices," said Edward Tang, Avegant's CTO. "So we looked into it."
The team soon found that there was a fundamental problem with much of the transparent, mixed-reality displays out there -- and it's that all of them have a fixed focal point. You could pin virtual things to a wall and manipulate them remotely with controllers, but you couldn't get up close. "The real experience I want to have is, I want to be able to just walk up to something and hold it or touch it, and have something feel like it was right in front of me," Tang said. "At the end of the day, if you want to display something within about a meter, the focus needs to be correct."
