Abanti Chowdhury/BI
I made a lot of questionable purchases as a teenage gadget geek in the 1990s, but the one that made my parents most regret giving me a credit card was the Sony Glasstron. The flimsy head-mounted display (which offered the "stunning" clarity of 800 x 600 pixels), the attached earbuds, and the video cable tether were all mine for the low, low price of $2,599 in 1999 dollars — or nearly $5K today. When the device arrived, delight turned to disappointment, and it was quickly returned. But my obsession with portable displays never went away. To me, it felt inevitable that we were on an evolutionary path toward perfect human-machine interfaces, erasing the separation between the infinite creativity of digital spaces and the limitations of our physical world.