Crystal video eyewear worth a look

If the future is the personal media viewer, I'm not seeing it.

The impregnated-safety-goggle design just won't fly. It doesn't matter what decade, or what century.

Why not just call these iPod goggles an eyepod and trim enough fat so they look like otherworldly, rechargeable sunglasses? Then maybe more people will start watching downloads of "The Secret Life of the American Teenager" flash before their eyes.

Better resolution

Myvu of Westwood, Mass., is halfway there. It still calls its products "video eyewear," but the Crystal 701 for iPod is almost sexy enough to wear in public.

Aside from being wearable, it's also watchable. Its DVD-quality (640 x 480) resolution is better than the 320 x 240 resolution of an iPod and other video eyewear.

So for the price of a pair of real Oakley shades, you get a miniature, on-your-face movie theater with surprisingly good attached earphones by Ultimate Ears, a control/battery pendant and enough wires so that anyone within a city block knows these are not mere sunglasses.

MyVu makes a Crystal 701 with a cable specifically for the iPod — that's the later Nanos, iTouch, Classic and fifth-generation video players — and a standard version for the non-iPod population.

The standard also works with just about any video-spewing device, whether a Zune, a mobile phone, portable DVD player, game console or a cable-television box.

A tiny movie theater

Two wires run from the headset to the control pendant, then another from the pendant to the iPod. You could probably lasso a steer with all the wires, but once the headset's in place, you're in another world.

For those who haven't tried video eyewear — and I know there must be hundreds of millions of you — it really is like peering into a tiny movie theater, with a back-row view of a white screen against a black background.

Down in front! Wait, that was only a mosquito.

For iPod viewing, the Crystal 701 produces a picture that looks quite good on the squarish screen. Although the resolution is better than an iPod, I still couldn't read the on-screen graphics when watching the Olympics or a baseball game with the headset connected to my cable box.

The earphones are about as good as it gets in video eyewear, and the headset lasts four hours per charge.

The Crystal 701, thanks to an adjustable nose pad, felt comfortable despite weighing almost 3 ounces.

I still don't see a future where everyone's walking around with a personal media viewer.

But maybe the Crystal 701 is a start. I was wrong about tattoos, too.