glyph

I boarded a flight recently without using my phone. My Snap Spectacles pulled up the boarding pass, a QR code appeared on a small wallet I had built, and the gate agent scanned it. The whole thing took about as long as it normally would. Afterward, I wasn’t thinking about whether it worked. I was thinking about how unremarkable it felt. The technology disappeared into the interaction. That’s what it should do.

The idea behind Glyph started with a simple observation: a wallet goes everywhere I go. It already holds credentials. It lives in my pocket without charging or demanding attention. Instrumenting something I already carry felt more interesting than building a new device to manage. The screen is e-ink. It draws almost no power, reads clearly in daylight, and disappears when there’s nothing to show.

I’ve been a software engineer for a long time. Most of what I build lives on a server somewhere. Learning to design a PCB, print an enclosure, cut acrylic card slots, and solder components together has been genuinely rewarding. Most of my work is invisible the moment I close the laptop. This isn’t.

The deeper motivation is a question I keep coming back to in my research: what role can everyday physical objects play in a post-phone world? XR glasses are increasingly discussed as the next main computing platform, but the world today is still built almost entirely around the phone. Glyph is a small experiment in what a stepping stone might look like. The interaction model is simple: you author something on the glasses, it lands on the wallet. A physical object in your pocket becomes an endpoint for XR-native experiences. Boarding passes are an obvious example. The surface could carry anything. Glyph isn’t a replacement for the phone, just a different kind of surface for specific interactions.

Part of the inspiration came from Mark Weiser’s early ubiquitous computing research. In one of his papers, he describes an alarm clock that “understands only yes and no.” Glyph has two buttons. One confirms, one rejects. That’s enough.

Weiser imagined technology that fades into the background — present when you need it, invisible when you don’t. Most of what we build today does the opposite. I found a quieter use I hadn’t planned for: in the mornings, it shows a journaling prompt. It’s there when I wake up, and a button press dismisses it. No feed opens. Nothing else happens. It’s a small thing, but it points at something I find more interesting the longer I sit with it. A device with no incentive to maximize your engagement is an unusual object.

I’m currently working on v2 of the hardware.