Glyph

The project sits inside a broader research question: what role can everyday physical objects play as computing moves away from the phone? XR glasses are an increasingly credible candidate for a next primary computing platform, but the world's infrastructure like payment terminals, gate readers and transit systems is built around the phone. Phones can show a QR code to an external reader. Today's XR glasses can't. Glyph is one way of thinking about the bridge: an object you already carry, already trusted, already in your pocket, that can quietly extend the reach of XR-native interactions into environments that weren't designed for them.

An early test of the system was boarding a flight without a phone. Snap Spectacles pulled up the boarding pass, Glyph displayed the QR code, and the gate agent scanned it. The interaction took about as long as it normally would. What was notable afterward wasn't that it worked — it was how unremarkable it felt. The credential moved from glasses to wallet to scanner without any part of that chain feeling unfamiliar to anyone involved. The external infrastructure didn't change. The phone was just absent.

Glyph began as the final project for How to Make Almost Anything, MIT's course on digital fabrication. The course runs students through the full making stack — PCB design, laser cutting, 3D printing, embedded programming — and asks for a functional, self-designed artifact at the end. 

The project is now in its second hardware iteration. V1 used a XIAO ESP32-C3 development module with hand-wired components in a printed enclosure. V2 moves to a custom PCB, reducing the device to something closer in depth to a standard card wallet. The capabilities are the same; the form is closer to what it would need to be to actually belong in a pocket.

Glyph is one branch of a wider set of questions about physical objects and post-phone computing. A parallel direction asks what it might mean to project intelligence into everyday objects rather than surface information from them.

A secondary use has emerged that sits somewhat apart from the XR bridging question. Because Glyph has no network feed, no notifications, and no app surface, it turns out to be a reasonable interface for low-attention interactions with AI systems. In the mornings it shows a journaling prompt. A button press dismisses it. Nothing else opens. The interaction is over in a second or it isn't, but either way it doesn't pull you somewhere else. This is a different kind of claim than the boarding pass use case: less about bridging infrastructure gaps and more about what AI interaction might look like on a device with no incentive to maximize engagement.  Glyph is also an attempt to find out whether there's space for a device like that.