This is only sort of an Avegant Glyph review

What can I tell you about the 20 hours I spent running through primeval forests, chasing down a saber-toothed tiger?

I can tell you that it was different for me than it was for the vast majority of people who have played Far Cry Primal. Because for me, it felt much more real. I was sitting in the same chair I'm sitting in now, but I wasn't really there at all. I was hunting that giant cat — or better put, it was hunting me. The sound of what seemed like my own breath rasped in my ears, and as the extinct beast loomed large in my face, it was happening literally on my face.


I was playing, you see, with a gadget called the Avegant Glyph. It's a head-mounted personal video player that projects moving images directly on to your eyes. It works with anything that has an HDMI output — like, say, my Xbox One.

It is not a virtual reality headset, it's something else. But like VR, it's part of a new class of headsets that offer immersion and cut off (to varying degrees) your senses from the outside. Of all of these headsets, the Glyph is the thing that has allowed me to go inside a different world for the longest, even though you can still look outside and see what's going on around you.

The Glyph looks like the insane image you see above — a ginormous pair of vaguely Beats-esque headphones that you wear with the band over your eyes. It looks like a cast-off prop from the 1995 movie Johnny Mnemonic. It costs an exorbitant $699.

HEADSETS CREATE AN OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCE WITHOUT LEAVING YOUR BODY
But get past all that and you end up with a "screen" that looks about the same size as a 50-inch TV from across the room. Except it's right there in front of your eyes. Playing that game was an out-of-body experience without leaving my body. I know that this is the kind of cliche talk you hear with virtual reality all the time. But it's different when instead of just having short "VR experiences," you spend five straight hours in it. I was here, in this chair, but the important parts of me were there and I was then — in the Stone Age.

Life is going to get super weird when everybody starts strapping screens to their face for extended periods of time.