Year 2070: A young man in a dirty, run down, four mile tall high-rise reaching into the smog and covered in holographic ads and QR code graffiti lays down and plugs his newly upgraded gaming system into the port in the back of his head, closes his eyes, and enters the virtual realm for some much needed reality escape. He tests his hardware by running glxgears. The toothed discs appear before him in the empty void, spinning smoothly and silently, assuring him that in a few moments, he can imagine a different life, if only for just a few hours.
besides the head socket; this was me in 2005 as a lowly IT analyst with an entire laboratory's worth of screens displaying glxgears 6 days per week making sure all of the workstations' display drivers were working correctly before deploying them to the engineers. that 6th day was me coming in on a saturday or sunday to take advantage of the REALLY nice and expensive hardware to try out the few games that worked on linux at the time. lol
it's used to verify that OpenGL ES2 works on your system. It's the variant of 3D graphics drivers that is used on smartphones. Many apps nowadays write their GFX frontend with GLES2 so it uses the same code on phones and PCs, and if they compile the app to run in the web browser, WebGL is also based on GLES2.